Liberty Alliance
 |
|
| Successor | Kantara Initiative |
|---|---|
| Established | September 2001 |
| Dissolved | 2009 |
| Purpose | Industry standards group |
The Liberty Alliance Project was an organization formed in September 2001 to establish standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management in computer systems. It grew to more than 150 organizations, including technology vendors, consumer-facing companies, educational organizations and governments. It released frameworks for federation, identity assurance, an Identity Governance Framework, and Identity Web Services.
By 2009, the Kantara Initiative took over the work of the Liberty Alliance.
The group was originally conceived and named by Jeff Veis, at Sun Microsystems based in Menlo Park, California. The initiative's goal, which was personally promoted by Scott McNealy of Sun, was to unify technology, commercial and government organizations to create a standard for federated, identity-based Internet applications as an alternative to technology appearing in the marketplace controlled by a single entity such as Microsoft's Passport. Another Microsoft initiative, HailStorm, was renamed My Services but quietly shelved by April 2002. Sun positioned the group as independent, and Eric C. Dean of United Airlines became its president.
In July 2002, the alliance announced Liberty Identity Federation (ID-FF) 1.0. At that time, several member companies announced upcoming availability of Liberty-enabled products. Liberty Federation allowed 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 did not require the user to re-authenticate and can support privacy controls established by the user. The Liberty Alliance released two more versions of the Identity Federation specification, and then in June 2003 contributed its federation specification, to OASIS, forming the foundation for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0. In 2007, industry analyst firm Gartner said it had wide acceptance.
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