Overview of the Liberty Alliance Project

In 2001 Sun Microsystems joined with other major companies to form the Liberty Alliance Project. The goals were to define standards for developing identity-based infrastructures, software, and web services, and to promote adoption of these standards. The Liberty Alliance Project does not deliver products or services. It defines frameworks to ensure interoperability between homogeneous products while respecting the privacy and security of identity data. This section contains the following information:

• Members of the Liberty Alliance Project

• Objectives of the Liberty Alliance Project Specifications

If you are already familiar with the concepts and protocols developed by the Liberty Alliance Project, go to Chapter 2, Implementation of the Liberty Alliance Project Specifications for information on how these standards are integrated into Access Manager.

Members of the Liberty Alliance Project

The members of the Liberty Alliance Project include some of the world’s most recognized companies, representing products, services and partnerships across a wide spectrum of consumer and business service providers. Members also include government organizations and technology vendors. For more information regarding membership (and a complete listing of current members), see the Liberty Alliance Project web site.

Only members of the Liberty Alliance Project are allowed to provide feedback on drafts of the specifications although any organization may implement them.

Objectives of the Liberty Alliance Project Specifications

The specifications developed by the Liberty Alliance Project enable individuals and organizations to securely conduct network transactions. The main objectives include:

• Serve as open standards for federated identity management and web services.

• Support and promote permission-based sharing of personal identity attributes.

• Provide a standard for SSO that includes decentralized authentication and authorization for multiple providers.

• Create an open network identity infrastructure that supports all current and emerging user agents (also referred to as browsers or wireless browsers).

• Enable consumers to protect their network identity information.