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I have also been working on a truely distrubuted password system. It is not near as complex as OpenID and also suffers from some of the basic identity problems. I doubt any of my work can be rolled in, but if it can i'd certainly be willing to help.<BR>
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He is my format in a nutshell.<BR>
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<A href="http://www.myWebSite.com">www.myWebSite.com</A> has a small xml file that is publicly accessible. It would look something similar to the following:<BR>
<BR>
<ol><BR>
<li type="text/sha1">bui373...732h3</li><BR>
</ol><BR>
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then at a site where i want to post a comment or login, i would supply two things:<BR>
1) the URL to my xml file (www.MyWebSite.com/some.xml)<BR>
2) my password in plain-text<BR>
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the site i wanted to login to would fetch my xml file and parse it. Then it would see type="text/sha1". It would then proceed to hash my plain-text password. If that sha1(plain-text) = XML li node value, then i have proven something only i would know.<BR>
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It also allows for additional information to be encoded in namespaces:<BR>
<ol><BR>
<li>...<li><BR>
<pref:backgroundColor>blue</pref:backgroundColor><BR>
</ol><BR>
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so certain websites can uses these additional tags, etc.<BR>
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All-in-all it is abit more complicated that this. I hope this illustrates the point. It is by no means a perfect system, but it is simple to implement and is truely distributed.<BR>
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Like i said, i am reading through the archives getting myself caught-up on OpenID, and i'm not sure any of my ideas can easily be rolled in since you are pretty far along in the implementation.<BR>
<BR>
-brian
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