The largest mobile operator in Japan, NTT docomo, which covers approximately 50% of Japanese population, started offering OpenID authentication on March 9.
Every docomo user has an identifier called i-modeID. Using this, users can single sign-on to mobile sites using docomo handsets, making one-click payment and other authenticated actions.
These kind of features fueled the great success of mobile commerce in Japan. However, this success has not been extended to the non-docomo handset world of the PC. For the PC, docomo offered a separate identifier called “docomo ID”. As it remained independent of “i-modeID”, it did not enjoy the same kind of popularity.
This situation was remedied today by linking the two different identity systems with OpenID.
As of today, a user can login to a site using “docomo ID” as an OpenID, then the site can obtain “i-mode ID” that is linked to the “docomo ID” transparently. It is expected that the payment on the PC sites through “i-mode payment service” would accelerate content sales through PC.
NTT docomo published the docomoID Authentication Technical Specification on their web site. As an OP Identifier, one should specify “https://i.mydocomo.com/“. As a normal claimed identifier, one should specify “https://i.mydocomo.com/id/{user_unique_identifier}” where {user_unique_identifier}” is a random alpha-numeric string that is unique to the user-realm pair.
One peculiar feature of docomo’s implementation is that, to provide “i-mode ID” to the content providers, content providers should call a very simple GET API after they obtained the OpenID Assertion. The decision seems to have been made to avoid the transmission of i-mode ID through browsers, which may act as a man-in-the-middle attack point as users’ PC environment is not particularly safe. Using OAuth for this purpose seems to have been an option, but docomo seems to have decided that requiring it on top of OpenID to the content providers seemed to be a little too demanding. Thus, they devised this extremely simple API. Together with it, docomo also defined a kind of contact service API, which allows the content providers to send mail [*1] to the user’s mobile phone without sharing the mail address.
According to their official page, there are 55,692,500 docomo subscribers as of February, 2010. Japan’s population over 15 as of Feb. 1, 2010 is 110,470,000.
[*1] Currently, this “contact service” is currently limited to send a mobile site URL
Tags: adoption, japan, mobile, nttdocomo
March 9th, 2010 at 10:53 am
[...] its mobile identity layer with a general web identity for users through OpenID, according to the OpenID Foundation. NTT docomo users will now be able to quickly and easily log-in to any OpenID supporting website [...]
March 12th, 2010 at 12:28 am
[...] OpenID Posted by Timan Rebel | Posted in Open Web | Posted on 11-03-2010NTT Docomo heeft 9 maart aangekondigd voor al zijn gebruikers OpenID te gaan aanbieden. NTT Docomo bedient ongeveer 50% van de Japanse [...]
March 30th, 2010 at 7:49 am
Sounds really great and it would make it faster to login to any site offering an OpenID.
Docomo really dominates Japan for their good services as well.
April 26th, 2010 at 5:57 am
We are in the process of building web site that is going to you a lot of different application. We need away to login to all the different applications. We are going to use Java, JavaScript, Tomcat, Liferay, and and soap based web service. Can you send me information on how I can integrate with OpenID on a high level and if there are different ways to do it? Please send me all the technical information you can.
Thank you
Warren Love
January 22nd, 2011 at 10:41 am
I love it that you can log in with your DocomoID. It is a very useful feature and quite useful for somebody who wants to save time. 55 million subscribers already. Wow.
January 30th, 2011 at 8:40 am
My experience by using NTT docomo is really good. I like to using this provider. Feature of docomo’s implementation is that, to provide “i-mode ID” to the content providers, content providers should call a very simple GET API after they obtained the OpenID Assertion.
February 24th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
It’s amazing to look back to this post and know how big OpenId is now.
February 27th, 2011 at 12:35 pm
This would be a concern to me as you open yourself to a wider range of identity theft (which in Japan is probably not as large of an issue as else ware)
Sometimes you have to pass on convenience to keep some of your security.
May 4th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
OpenID needs to be embraced by more. Yes it has grown in leaps and bounds over the past year.
But it’s a great system that if used widely will be even greater!
December 7th, 2011 at 1:27 am
Sounds really great and it would make it faster to login to any site offering an OpenID.
Docomo really dominates Japan for their good services as well.
Leave a Reply