Here's a modified diagram of below, showing the additional steps that happen behind the scenes. A few more notes and caveats:
- the flow for this diagram comes from here; all mistakes are mine I'm sure
- this diagram is made from the perspective of how I think our application has to do it; there may be more to OpenID that I'm showing
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new parts are in redish
- I've try to simplify things so that "new to OpenID users" can easily understand what's going on. This required a couple of shortcuts:
- David's Identity Page (i.e. http://davidjanes.myopenid.com) doesn't have to on the same server or domain as the server that's actually doing the authentication (MyOpenID.com). David could, for example, use http://www.davidjanes.com to login and still get MyOpenID to do the login. We'll dedicate a whole post to this so stand by.
- The diagram uses the preferred login flow that uses a "Diffie Hellman exchange" to create the shared secret (a diagram of the gory details are here in comp-sci hieroglyphics). There's also a "dumb mode" that skips the shared secret stage and let's the "consumer" (i.e. the role BlogMatrix.com is playing) validate the login after the final redirect.
- If the MyOpenID has never seen David log in from BlogMatrix before, it is supposed to confirm first with David that he trusts BlogMatrix with his identity
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