The Liberty Alliance Project has released details
outlining its federated identity-management architecture, in a move
that it said would help companies resolve technical issues
encountered when building the foundation for web
services.
"The architecture outlines where we are going and explains our
long-term technical vision," said Michael Barrett, president of the
Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of internet
technology strategy at American Express.
The alliance, which was formed in 2001, is a consortium of
companies and organisations which aims to develop open standards
for identity management and identity-based services on the web.
Members include technology titans such as Sun Microsystems, which
spearheaded the project, as well as AOL and Cisco Systems.
The group released technical specifications in July last year to
address the basic issues of federation and simplified sign-on and
is set to released another set in mid-2003 aimed at building
interoperable identity-based web services, which also address
privacy, security and business needs.
The new architecture, however, offers companies a road map of
where the group is headed, Barrett said, allowing companies to plan
for future versions of technical specifications due to be released
from the group.
According to the architecture, which is posted in a white paper
on the group's Web site at
http://www.projectliberty.org,
the first module lays out Liberty's identity federation framework,
including opt-in account linking, simplified sign-on, anonymity and
session management.
The second module details adopting and extending other industry
standards such as SOAP, XML and SAML , while the third module lays
out a Liberty Identity web services framework.
In the fourth module, the group outlines interface
specifications for identity services, for building basic user
profiles, for example.
"This road map really talks about what we've done and sets up a
framework for interoperable ID-based services," said Jason Rouault,
chair of Liberty Alliance's technology expert group and senior
architect at Hewlett-Packard.
While the alliance appears to be gaining momentum, and has seen
its ranks swell recently as more companies and government agencies
hop on board, it is still seen as at odds with software behemoth
Microsoft which has its own answer to single sign-on and identity
management with Passport.
Barrett said he sees the group's work as separate from
Microsoft's service, however.
"Passport is a centralised service operated by a single
company," he said, adding that Liberty's federated model is more
flexible.
While Microsoft and the Liberty Alliance are clearly headed down
different paths, the consortium seems confident that the
architecture it is presenting will not only give companies a
technical framework on which to build identity-based web services,
but will also help businesses form new practices to ease web
services implementation.
"This isn't just about building specifications and technology
... it's about addressing business issues," said Simon Nicholson,
Liberty Alliance's chair of the business and marketing expert
group.