The
Liberty Alliance identity standards organisation has released
the first versions of the
Identity Assurance Framework (IAF)and the Identity Governance
Framework (IGF).
The two standardised frameworks are designed to fill
cross-industry requirements for driving trust into enterprise and
user-driven
Web 2.0 identity-enabled applications.
The IAF fills cross industry requirements for policy criteria to
allow organisations to link
identity systems together based on a uniform definition of the
security and privacy risks associated with four levels of identity
assurance.
Liberty Alliance intends to launch an IAF identity assurance
accreditation and certification program during the third quarter of
this year.
"The Liberty Identity Assurance Framework provides federation
operators and organisations in every sector with an industry
standard for moving multi-protocol federations ahead based on
trusted identity assurance levels," said Frank Villavicencio,
co-chair of the Liberty Identity Assurance Expert Group and
director for Citigroup Global Transaction Services.
"The IAF delivers the business and policy foundation developers,
businesses and system integrators can now begin to use to more
easily build and deploy a wide variety of new federated services
and enterprise-grade Web 2.0 applications," he said.
The newly released IGF is the industry's first programmatic and
auditable open-standards-based framework, said Liberty.
It helps organisations meet regulatory requirements by allowing
enterprises to more easily determine and control how identity
information - including
personally identifiable information - is used and stored across
diverse systems.
This helps to ensure the information is easily auditable and not
abused, compromised or misplaced.
"The first release of the Liberty Identity Governance Framework
is a significant proof point in demonstrating how Liberty Alliance
is committed to delivering the policy-based systems organisations
needed to build and deploy more successful enterprise and Web 2.0
applications," said Brett McDowell, executive director of the
Liberty Alliance.