Identity Management: Introduction to Molecules: How Atoms Come Together

So far, I have covered all the fundamental elements that are needed for the Calculus of Identity Management.  Recall that they are:

• Randomness, because unpredictability is hard to break,
• Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) and Nonces, for identifying unique things, and for providing unique tokens,
• Cryptographic hashes, to check that documents have not been altered, or to keep passwords from prying eyes,
• Symmetric keys, to pass data between two people, keeping prying eyes from understanding it,
• Asymmetric keys, to share symmetric keys in a safe-ish way, and to confirm other people's identities,

And, as an honorable mention,

• Steganography, because it's sometimes fun to hide data under people's noses!  And, er, because it can sometimes be useful to "watermark" pictures!

None of these things, by themselves, provide identity management.  They need to be brought together to do interesting things!  And this is where things get interesting -- because while we only have a small number of tools to manage identities, they come together in rich and complex ways -- in much the same way that atoms are relatively boring, but come together to provide innumerable molecules that make the universe possible.

As I cover these patterns, I won't be doing it in any particular order (beyond my personal whimsy); indeed, as these are sufficiently complex, there might not be an "order" to them that makes sense!