Beyond Passwords: Secure Authentication with Mozilla Persona
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the best explanation of how Persona's provisioning and login work, and of why it used email addresses as identity.
What it is
Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2013 to 2016.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec spellboots · 2013-12 · on “Show HN: No More Passwords, Just Email”
Please use Persona, it's this idea but much more thoroughly thought out and tested. Here is a great video about it: [this video] If you have not heard of Persona, or have heard of it but don't see what the big deal is / why it's different to "Login with google", "Login with twitter" etc, then go watch this video. It is a very elegant, decentralised solution to the login problem.
Cites callahad · 2013-03 · on “Persona is distributed. Today.”
Check out around the 16:00 mark in this video: [this video] Notice that provisioning (steps 1 and 2) and logging into a site (steps 3 and 4) are two completely independent processes, with the browser mediating any identifiable identity-provider-to-target-site communication.
Cites callahad · 2015-10 · on “OAuth Has Ruined Everything”
Persona didn't have the notion of a global password -- the ideal flow had you authenticating with your email provider, on their domain, which was often completely transparent in cases where you were already signed in to that provider. Try logging into 123done.org with whatever you want @mockmyid.com to get a sense of what that would ideally look like. My talk from PyCon 2013 goes into a little detail about how the protocol works: [this video]
Cites zeristor · 2015-10 · on “OAuth Has Ruined Everything”
I've learnt a lot from this thread, I'd not heard of Mozilla Persona before. Could it be The One Ring to rule them all? Charles Stross has his Rule34, I propose Rule 42 is that if something exists there must be a YouTube video of it. This one of a Dan Callahan presentation from a few years back [this video] With Rule38 being a blend of the two.
Cites callahad · 2016-10 · on “Portier – An email-based, passwordless authentication service”
There's a little more discussion of that over on Lobsters: [LINK] . The TL;DR is that URIs just didn't work for the mass public. You had to supplement the login form with a NASCAR-esque wall of logos, which was awful for different reasons. Thus, Portier, and Persona before it, chose to identify users by email addresses. I talk a little bit about that at 9:05 in my PyCon 2013 talk on Persona: [this video]