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Overview
The Liberty Alliance was formed in 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for federated identity management. The Liberty Alliance met this goal with the release of Liberty Federation in 2002, the industry standard for successfully addressing the many authentication, privacy and security challenges surrounding online identity management. Deployed by organizations around the world, Liberty Federation allows consumers and users of Internet-based services and e-commerce applications to authenticate and sign-on to a network or domain once from any device and then visit or take part in services from multiple Web sites. This federated approach does not require the user to reauthenticate and can support privacy controls established by the user. The market requirements documents and case studies of deploying organizations, as well as presentations of deployments are available. The Liberty Alliance contributed its federation specifications, ID-FF, to OASIS, forming the foundation for SAML 2.0, the converged federation specification that Liberty now recognizes.
Having grown to nearly 150 members including global technology vendors, consumer-facing companies, educational organizations and governments from around the world, the Liberty Alliance released Liberty Web Services in 2003. Developed based on well defined business requirements and with controls for consumer and user privacy always at the forefront, Liberty Web Services is an open framework for deploying and managing a variety of identity-based Web services. Liberty Web Services applications include Geo-location, Contact Book, Calendar, Mobile Messaging and Liberty People Service, the industry's first open Web services framework for managing social applications such as bookmarks, blogs, calendars, photo sharing and instant messaging in a secure and privacy respecting federated social network. The Liberty Alliance works very openly with other standards organizations, adopting published standards and contributing relevant work as appropriate. With the deployment of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services continuously increasing, the Liberty Alliance has tracked well over one billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices at the end of 2006. The wide scale deployment of Liberty's open specifications combined with consumer and industry demands for better protection against online fraud and identity theft, led to the creation of Liberty's Strong Authentication Expert Group (SAEG) in the fall of 2005. This group of industry leaders is working to ensure strong authentication solutions such as hardware and software tokens, smart cards, SMS-based systems and biometrics, interoperate seamlessly in a federated network environment. A snapshot of organizations deploying Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services is available on the Adoption section of the Liberty homepage. Additionally, the Liberty Alliance is helping to drive open source development with openLiberty.org, as well as encouraging additional open source activities. The Alliance has also made an open call for participation in the development of use cases, through the Concordia Program, that will help drive harmonization of specifications in the identity space. The Liberty Alliance is committed to helping to grow the identity marketplace, and help deployers to be successful and cost-effective in their deployments. As such, it introduced the Liberty Interoperable (TM) certification program in 2003, designed to test commercial and open source products against published standards to assure base levels of interoperability between products. This program has been recognized globally by end deployers for the assurance that it gives them that products work as advertised, saving time, money, and critical resources as deployers roll out solutions. Currently, more than 80 products have passed testing. The Liberty Alliance has also focused heavily on the business and policy aspects of identity management, publishing business and policy guidelines in a variety of forms for different business and legal audiences in a variety of vertical sectors. The Liberty Alliance encourages and helps promote public dialogue that helps organizations to better understand how to set up Circles of Trust for federated deployments and other business considerations so that organizations can succeed in their deployments.
