Sun Identity Management

The Liberty Alliance was founded in the fall of 2001 by Sun and several other companies dedicated to the development of open technology, policy and business specifications for federated identity management. As a founding member of the Liberty Alliance, Sun has helped create and deliver interoperable standards and guidelines for Federated identity management allows users to "link" elements of their identity between accounts without centrally storing all of their personal information.

The Liberty Alliance specifications define the technical and business protocols and policies that:

• Enable consumers to protect the privacy and security of their identity information
• Allow businesses to maintain and manage customer relationships without third-party participation
• Provide an open, cross-domain single single sign-on (SSO) framework that includes decentralized authorization and authentication from multiple providers
• Allow for advanced policy framework for developing role-based policies to facilitate regulatory and privacy compliance

Liberty Alliance remains the only global body focusing on this effort and today represents over 160 organizations, including leaders in technology, financial services, telecommunications, mobile services, government and manufacturing.

To date, Liberty has released several sets of specifications that facilitate federated identity management. This includes Liberty's ID-FF (Identity Federation Framework), which enables cross-domain single sign-on and global log-out, and Liberty's ID-WSF (Web Services Framework), which serves as the foundation upon which identity-based Web services can be deployed. Liberty is in the process of developing ID-SIS (Service Interface Specifications), which will allow for new and existing identity-based Web services to be deployed on the Liberty Architecture.

Just as significant as Liberty Alliance's technology progress is the critical work the Alliance has done to address the substantial business and policy challenges associated with a federated identity management deployment. This output includes:

• Policy
• Privacy Enablers
• Business Guidelines

To learn more about Liberty Alliance, visit www.projectliberty.org.