Ideas

there are so many services for this already

Most browsers have this feature built in.

I read the idea as being slightly more powerful than the password safe built into browsers like IE and Firefox in that it allows direct access rather than just providing the password. If that's the case it would be useful but it would require massive cooperation with huge numbers of different sites.

Otherwise, yes - why spend time, effort and money developing something that comes as standard for free?

While PhilipH is right that this might be a little more advanced than browser functions, there's still a lot of competition. There are a number of open source projects that do this type of thing and even more commercial options.

This is a topic that's close to my heart. I wrote a very nice little web-service app about a decade ago that does strong client-side encryption to solve exactly this problem. It's been updated over the years to include a nice Web 2.0 interface, etc. Yet my company only uses it internally and hasn't bothered to market it because there is a lot of competition and because most people who understand security and want a strong solution have some sort of solution already and it's very hard to get them to change. It's a very tough market.

I use http://www.netvibes.com/
It has all kind of widgets to do just that
Tommy

Already exists, http://openid.net/ is the leader

ok, so why do only geeks know about it?

Someone needs to develop a marketable/profitable model and publicise it.

Right, I've had a look at the supposedly many services that do this, and they don't do what i'm proposing.

I'm aware that cookies offer some of this functionality, but then you'd have to re-sign in when you wiped your cookies etc. and anyway cookies don't allow re-entry to banking sites etc. when you let the idle timer expire or whatever, you have to log in from scratch.

As it seems i'm obviously not explaining my concept clearly enough, check out a partial implementation of the idea on http://www.egg.com

They have an application called egg.money which allows you to access all your financial instituions through the egg site, after you have downloaded the password safe to your own computer and entered the necessary info into it.

This application interrogates whichever site you want to be able to access through egg money, and then asks you to enter the necessary data into the password safe.

This does not require cooperation from the sites that are accessed, (one person's criticism of my idea).

Once set up, after logging onto the egg.money site, ALL your banking info is available on one screen, no matter who the account is held with.

If you want to go to a given account page you simply click on the list in egg. money and as you are already signed in you just see the account page info as you would if you had gone directly to the site and entered your logon.

My idea is simply to expand this functionality to include all sites chosen by the user, predominantly utilitie, but also others as they see fit.

Unless i am missing something, this is not possible with eg OpenID as when I tried it, although my facebook account info was available on logging on, when I tried to go to my facebook account, I had to re-enter my logon info.

oops, meant netvibes. Haven't tried OpenID yet, but I don't see why I should choose a provider, it should be a simple one stop service interrogating my password safe to allow access through the portal to any site I have an account with and have provided info to the safe for.

In fact, now that I have read the OpenID blurb, it is in fact doing the exact opposite of my proposal and requires sites to sign up to the concept.

My proposal is to create a piece of software that interrogates the site in question, to determine what information the site logon requires.

(User ID, Password, Specific letters from a password etc.)

Once the software knows what that specific site's requirements are it provides them when you log on to the website that supports my service.

This is much easier to implement than having to ask each developer to please support yet another standard.

It also allows the individual institutions to implement their own security as they see fit.

And for the user's logon info to be different, (if they so choose), for each account they hold.

I really do not think that any service available offers the functionality I am proposing, nor the flexibility or attractiveness of my proposal.