The Liberty Alliance Project is a consortium of companies working on a standard way for a person to enter a name and password once to connect securely to several Web sites. Sun Microsystems launched the Liberty project in 2001 to offer an alternative to Microsoft's Passport system for authenticating a person's identity over the Web. The Liberty Alliance now has 160 members.
At the RSA Conference 2003 Tuesday, the Liberty Alliance detailed version 2.0 of the standard. Members of the consortium also demonstrated a single sign-in to multiple Web sites using software that is compatible with the current version of the Liberty standard, version 1.1.
The Liberty Alliance on Tuesday published a draft specification for the update, which is due in the third quarter of this year. The consortium also published security and privacy guidelines to help companies build Web sites that comply with local regulations.
The second version of the Liberty specification maps a way for Web users to exchange information with Web sites without revealing their identity. It is also designed to allow people to specify a set of affiliated sites onto which they can log.
The Liberty Alliance in the third quarter plans to publish guidelines for building Web services that use the Liberty specification. Web services are applications that use Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based protocols to share information between disparate systems.
In related news, Liberty has submitted version 1.1 of its specification to a security committee at the standards group Oasis. Oasis may incorporate functions from Liberty with the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard, which outlines a way to exchange security information between disparate security systems.
