Liberty Alliance To Validate Secure Network Identity

The new program will help vendors and solution providers ensure that applications and products support the Liberty framework, which provides a standard way for users and applications to identify themselves in Web-based transactions, according to a group spokesperson.

The Liberty Alliance interoperability certification program allows vendors and solution providers to brand services and products that have conformed with Liberty specifications with a Liberty Alliance logo, according to the group.

Companies claiming conformance must participate in a Liberty-sponsored interoperability event, following published guidelines to prove compatibility with other Liberty-enabled products and compliance with the Liberty standard. The program is open to both members of the Liberty Alliance and nonmembers.

In related news, the Liberty Alliance also is slated to begin working in earnest on developing a secure standard for federated network identity across mobile networks through technology contributed by Radicchio Ltd., a mobile security industry group.

Radicchio will contribute all of its existing work in the area of mobile data services, called the Trusted Transaction Roaming platform, to the Liberty Alliance for further development, a Liberty spokesperson said.

The platform is a concept for securely authenticating mobile users across networks for offering data services. The platform will allow service providers to offer data services to other network operators' customers, thus offering customers a wider choice of services without leaving their existing operator networks, according to the Liberty Alliance.

Sun Microsystems spearheaded the Liberty Alliance two years ago as a consortium of companies to agree on a standard way to allow users to identify themselves electronically on the Web. This network identity enables user authentication and authorization across different applications on multiple Web-enabled devices, thus allowing companies who have agreed to support Liberty to share user information securely across networks.

In addition to Sun, VeriSign, Vodafone, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Novell and American Express are part of the management board of the 160-member alliance.

The Liberty framework is based on extending the SAML specification for secure identity management for Web services. SAML is an XML framework for exchanging user authentication and authorization information between networked computers and devices. The Liberty standards are similar to work Microsoft, IBM and another group of vendors are doing to extend WS-Security--a broadly supported Web services security standard--to achieve the same end.