Nine Vendors Earn Liberty Alliance Seal
In October, The Liberty Alliance announced its new standards-based certification program to spur the adoption of Web services
Less than two months later, nine companies have earned the group's interoperable logo -- proof that their products and services adhere to common architecture for user ID management.
The consortium announced the news at the Inside ID Conference in Washington on Tuesday. The companies include: Ericsson, Nokia, NTT, NTT Communications, NTT Software, Phaos Technology, Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems and Trustgenix.
The companies certified an array of offerings. Ericsson's soon-to-be released User Session & Identity Server 1.0 product, which is the core of the Ericsson identity management solutions for telecom operators, passed the test. As did the Nokia WAP
Sun earned the seal of approval for its Java System Identity Server, which features identity management capabilities, such as role-based access control and delegated user administration.
Spearheaded by Sun, the alliance was formed in 2001 as an alternative to Microsoft's Passport authentication initiative. Its goal is to develop standards for user identification for single sign-on and authentication on multiple sites and devices.
The alliance continues its work in the SAML
But SAML, an XML-based framework, is also one of several security-based languages that are under consideration by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which helps ratify interoperability standards.
OASIS is working on version 2.0 of the SAML security language after it ratified version 1.0 of SAML in November 2002. At the same time, Microsoft and IBM are working on a separate identity standard and OASIS has said it would consider all submissions to the next version of SAML before version 2.0 is ratified.