Click here to watch Mozilla Persona: The Web's decentralised identity API.

Almost everything we do on the web is governed by open standards. Proving who we are to websites is critically important, but we don't use an open standard for it. The web browser doesn't understand what is going on.

Passwords are unsustainable, but delegating our identity to a handful of for-profit corporations is not the way forward.

Persona connects identity providers (for example, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail), web browsers, and websites. It is browser mediated, i.e. it will be totally decentralised. Your identity provider will have no knowledge of which sites you are signing into.

Mozilla is bootstrapping the ecosystem. Eventually it will be possible to sign in using Persona without any Mozilla service being involved whatsoever.

One of the senior developers of Persona, Dan Callahan from Mozilla, will start by providing some history of authentication systems, an overview of how Persona works, and a comparison with other technologies.

Jonathan Brown from Bluedroplet will then demonstrate the Drupal module he wrote for signing in with Persona: https://drupal.org/project/persona

There is a demo site here: see.drupalpersona.me