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GCN Home > 11/29/07 web stories

Liberty Alliance releases federated identity framework

By Joab Jackson

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The Liberty Alliance identity technology consortium has issued a draft framework that organizations could use to share identity information for electronic transactions.

The Alliance’s Identity Assurance Expert Group developed the Liberty Identity Assurance Framework. The alliance is seeking feedback on the draft.

The idea behind the framework is to simplify the process for an organization to use credentials from other organizations without incurring the considerable costs of integrating with external identity management systems on a one-by-one basis.

Members of the working group include technical experts from the financial services, government, health care, information technology and telecommunications sectors.

“Organizations now have an industry standard for quickly moving wide-scale interoperable federations ahead based on identity assurance which enables a foundation of trust,” said Jane Hennessy, co-chair of the working group, in a statement.

The framework offers a set of four assurance levels to which participating organizations will map their identity services. Alliance-accredited assessors will verify such systems meet the criteria in a program expected to begin by mid-2008.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Authentication / Identity Management, Data Management