I propose to implement/integrate OpenID Attribute Exchange with Drupal. OpenID Attribute Exchange is a service extension for OpenID. OpenID Attribute Exchange allows identity information exchange between endpoints, i.e, it allows or rather is a way of transferring information about the user between the OpenID provider and relying party . Using the OpenID Attribute Exchange, identity information can be stored and retrieved using fetch and store messages respectively.

Both the fetch and store operations are performed only as a part of the OpenID authentication request itself. This helps the identity provider to first confirm with the user whether to send a particular attribute to a relying party or not. Also if the required attribute is not already stored with the identity provider, then the identity provider can ask the user to enter the required values so that they can be used upon any further query for the same attribute. Also a predefined policy can be used by the identity provider to decide what all data is to be send to a particular relying party. This helps in creation of personas. Its possible for any user to have multiple personas as a part of their identity. For exapmle a user can have a home persona for use within social networking sites and another work persona for use within professional/work sites. Basically a persona is a subset of the user's identity data.

For store requests, the identity provider the user can be asked for confirmation before storing any attributes on their identity.
Drupal has integrated OpenID support into its core from Drupal-6.0. Also Drupal supports OpenID server as Identity Provider(IdP) in Drupal-4.7, though its still to be ported to higher versions.

OpenID is the shared identity service relieving Internet users from remembering tons of user-names and passwords to login to various sites. Using a openID, a user can log on to various websites supporting OpenID using a single digital identity.The ease of openID is its being decentralized, free and open sourced. The end user has complete control over the amount of personal information they provide and hence it takes care of the privacy issues concerned.

The number of openID providers is growing day by day and its an initiative for more and more sites to be openID enabled and be either providers and/or relying party.As of July 2007, there were over 120 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 4,500 sites had integrated OpenID consumer support.