Open Phishing

(via Rod Begbie)

Marco Slot has written up a “Beginner’s Guide to OpenID Phishing” to demonstrate how vulnerable the popular distributed identity system can be to impersonation / person-in-the-middle attacks.

The real problem, of course, is the reliance on username/password based authentication schemes, and the ease with which a login form (for the OpenID provider itself) can be spoofed - even dynamically spoofed so that the phishing site can be reacting in real time to whatever provider you’ve used.

OpenID is a great system we’d all like to see succeed, but in it’s current form it must be used rather cautiously and with an eye out for attacks like those Marco describes.