About Identity Files

An identity file is a text file containing information about a particular SimpleID user.

There is one identity file for each SimpleID user. They are stored in the identities directory and are named username.identity, where username is the name of the SimpleID user.

Identity files are text files formatted as Windows INI file format. See Wikipedia for more information about this file format. If a value contains non-alphanumeric characters, you will need to surround it with quotation marks.

Creating an Identity File

An example identity file is example.identity.dist in the identities directory. Make a copy of this file and rename it username.identity, where username is the user name with which you want to log into SimpleID.

Open the file with a text editor and edit the identity file.

The file contains comments explaining what each line does.

Contents of Identity Files

The following is an extract from the example.identity.dist file to provide an example of the contents of an identity file.

;
; The OpenID Identifier associated with this identity.  This is typically a
; URL, although the OpenID specifications allow the use of URIs and even XRIs.
;
; Relying parties must be able to resolve the identity to obtain the address
; of this SimpleID installation.
;
; Examples:
;    http://example.com/
;    http://example.com:8888/
;    http://example.com/myopenid
;    https://example.com:8080/myopenid
;
identity="http://example.com/"

;
; The password associated with this identity.  
;
; The password is encoded as follows:
;
;     pass="hash:algorithm:salt"
;
; There are three components to the password string.  Only the first component
; (the hash) is required, the other two are optional.
;
; 1. The hash of the password.  By default, the algorithm for hashing the
;    password is MD5.
;
;    There are various tools available which will give you the MD5 hash of any
;    given string.  If you have access to the command-line interface of PHP, you
;    can run the following command to give you the hash.
;
;    php -r "print md5('example password');"
;
;    Alternatively, you can upload the following PHP code to your web server, then
;    read off the hash with your web browser.  (This is recommended only if your
;    web server supports secure uploads (e.g. SFTP) and HTTPS, you that your
;    password is not sent over the Internet as clear text.)
;
;    <?php header('Content-Type: text/plain'); print md5('example password'); ?>
;
;    Alternatively, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5) has other resources
;    on generating this hash.
;
; 2. The algorithm used to hash the password.  If this is omitted, 'md5' is assumed.
;
;    Allowed algorithms are:
;
;    - md5
;    - sha1
;    - if the hash module is enabled, pbkdf2 and any algorithms available from that
;      module
;
; 3. Other parameters.
;
;    For md5 and sha1, this is an optional salt used to hash the password.  If
;    used, the password is appended by a colon character (:) then the salt before
;    a hash is calculated, that is:
;
;    hash(password:salt)
;
;    For pbkdf2, it is the underlying pseudorandom function, the number of
;    iterations and the salt, separated by colons.
;
; Examples (these contain the same password):
;    1a79a4d60de6718e8e5b326e338ae533                   ; MD5 hash and no salt
;    c3499c2729730a7f807efb8676a92dcb6f8a3f8f:sha1      ; SHA1 hash and no salt
;    f5e6ea5714945786623ad3932ccc757d::ideally-a-large-number-of-random-characters-to-use-as-salt                   ; MD5 hash with salt
;    9bce4e6997c6f2590717686bd62f99e33d5c6e1c:sha1:ideally-a-large-number-of-random-characters-to-use-as-salt       ; SHA1 hash with salt
;    c6e1aa5914c6e4e55fae69093afbc02e180810dcc7d3da9f863aa54f3d76e2c3:pbkdf2:sha256:100000:ideally-a-large-number-of-random-characters-to-use-as-salt ; PBKDF2
;
pass="cca6e030d81f0de52eb3f75c790ad056e57abaae:sha1:C2WG7PRM7PICMN5R"

;
; Whether this user is given administrative privileges in SimpleID.
;
; This setting has no effect in the current version of SimpleID.  However,
; more functionality may be added to SimpleID in future versions which will
; be restricted to SimpleID administrators.
;
; You should grant administrative privileges to at least one user.
;
; If you wish this user to be given administrative privileges, uncomment the
; line below.
;
administrator=1