BT joins Liberty Alliance board to promote federated identity management

BT has joined the management board of the Liberty Alliance digital identity body.

BT joins Liberty Alliance 2008 board members from AOL, France Telecom, HP, Intel, Novell, NTT, Oracle and Sun Microsystems towards developing secure federated identity management systems.

Federated identity management allows web users to use a single sign-on mechanism to access resources from multiple sites.

Robert Temple, vice-president of security technologies at the BT Group Chief Technology Office, said, "BT is expanding its role in Liberty Alliance to help drive a secure and privacy-respecting internet identity layer across applications, industries and regions."

BT joined Liberty Alliance as a sponsor member in 2006. During 2008, BT will participate in the Liberty Alliance Identity Assurance Expert Group (IAEG) and corresponding public Identity Assurance Special Interest Group (IASIG).

BT will "advance trusted inter-federations spanning industries, regions and technologies based on certified identity assurance levels", said Liberty Alliance.