Liberty Alliance responds to MS and IBM identity system

By Alun Williams

Posted on 14 Jul 2003 at 15:19

Liberty Alliance has responded to the WS-Federation specification for managing user identities as part of Web Services - IBM and Microsoft want to federate your identity. It has also published a set of business guidelines - templates to help organisations manage the propagation of user identities and policies.

This area concerns a 'federated identity' system, such as that can support single sign-ins - eg a single login can be propagated across all participating trusted systems. For example, if someone logs in with service-provider A, then - seamlessly and transparently - their identity can also be accepted by service-provider B to provide supplementary data or information.

James Vanderbeek, Chair of the Business Requirements Group at Liberty Alliance, emphasised the track record of Liberty Alliance in dealing with issues of federated identities. 'We are already two years down the line,' he said.

With IBM and Microsoft finally publishing the specification for their previously announced WS-Federation initiative, he said, it was a good opportunity to bring the two camps together. Now their proposals had been published they could be better examined by the industry, he maintained.

He conceded that while Liberty is based on SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), the WS-Federation framework can employ a range of security, such as Kerberos and XRML (eXtensible rights Markup Language). This was simply because Liberty Alliance had chosen not to implement other systems, he maintained. There was nothing stopping them doing this in future.

Vanderbeek is also Senior Manager of Strategy at Vodafone. He agreed that federation of identity was an important means for telcos to generate revenue with third-party services, without the end-user having to re-specify personal settings or profiles. He confirmed that the Liberty Alliance specification was on the company's roadmap for the Vodafone Live! Management of user identities.

He also asserted that the work of Liberty was underpinning Vodafone's 'transition from voice services to data services'. Another example of a Liberty-based initiative was Nokia's commitment, he said, for all future Smartphones, 'WAP terminals', to support the Liberty specs.

You can find other Liberty case studies projectliberty.org/resources/casestudies/

The new business templates can be found at http://projectliberty.org./resources/LibertyBusinessGuidelines.pdf.

Vanderbeek said the templates would enable Vodafone to apply the principles of voice roaming to GSMA-based data roaming.