Architectural Lessons in Identity from the Higgs Boson

As I read the details of last week's virtual confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, I smacked myself on the head with a "D'oh!"

As an architect, I've been preaching against tight coupling for years, and I utterly failed to realise that there could be examples of tight coupling in the way we think about the real world.

What the discovery of the Higgs boson does is confirm what is called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and one of the fundamental, though unintuitive, aspects of that model is that mass is not an inherent property of a particle. A particle may acquire mass through interaction with the Higgs field, but it's not necessary. That's why it's possible for particles like photons to have no mass.

It's ironical that in the months just prior to this discovery in the world of Physics, I made a modest discovery of my own that nevertheless shook the foundations of my conceptual world. In the realm of identity management, I realised that any given entity has no inherent properties (attributes) at all! All attributes that an entity may be deemed to have are only by association (just as a particle acquires mass independently of its existence), and therefore the only necessary aspect of an entity is a unique and meaning-free identifier to set it apart from other similar entities. Attributes can then be assigned and de-assigned to it at will through the mechanism of the identifier, and gradually a more sophisticated model can be built up. In creating such sophisticated models, it's important to remember that nothing is inherent to an entity, - not first name/last name, not primary email address, not social security number, - nothing! Just a unique identifier that is internal to the domain and kept invisible to the world outside the domain.

I've found this minimalist model of identity to be amazingly powerful and flexible. In addition to having arbitrary groups of attributes associated with an entity's identifier to form its properties, multiple external identifiers can also be independently associated with the (internal) identifier. The usual surrogate for identity, the username, is then just one such external identifier. Much of the conceptual confusion in identity management comes from mistaking external identifiers like username for the entity itself, leading to extremely clumsy and costly implementations. By creating an explicit internal identifier and treating any external identifier as an attribute associated with the internal identifier, such confusion and costly error can be avoided.

Cross-domain entity references can also be managed very cleanly by mapping both domains' internal identifiers to a shared external identifier, so that neither domain is coupled to the other domain's internal identifier for an entity. That's goodness!

Federated identity, such as when using one's FaceBook ID to enter a website, is nothing but treating the FaceBook ID as an external identifier and associating it with the website's internal identifier to establish the entity's identity. So multiple domains can independently maintain models about the same entity, and for most of the time, they can behave as though they are dealing with different entities. When it becomes necessary for the two domains to recognise these entities as the same, they then create a shared identifier that is external to both of them, and they each map this external identifier to their respective internal identifier.

This is a model of federation that does not make the assumption that there is a centre of the universe. No domain is the centre of the universe. Every domain is independent, and when they need to share their model of an entity, they loosely associate their entity references through a shared external identifier. There is now traceability across domains, but no implied control. I've found in practice that this is the only model that works, - technically, logistically and politically.

It's amazing that I should receive indirect confirmation of my identity model from as unlikely a source as Particle Physics, but I guess that's just a reflection of the fundamental nature of all things.

We have nothing inherent to ourselves but an identity. That's a pretty humbling thought that verges on the religious.