14 January, 2005 - 10:25am

On the Internet, how do you solve the problem of trust? How do you prove that someone is in fact who they claim to be?

Phil Windley's article on Lightweight Identity points to this very problem. As Phil notes, it's not an issue to trust somebody about information with little risk involved, like contact information, but there is considerable risk in trusting somebody's word on whether they have a degree or driver's license. Systems like LID don't offer a solution for that problem; SXIP does.

Sxip developer, Andy Smith, provides an in-depth response that discusses the mechanisms, defined in the SXIP protocol for providing assertions issued by an authoritative source.

If you want to look under the hood, and check out the specs yourself, they're available for download at: https://sxip.net/specs.