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With Liberty and single sign-on for all

The Liberty Alliance Project seeks to solve the current online identity crisis

By Todd E. Sundsted, JavaWorld.com, 02/15/02

If you spend much time online, chances are you have established more than one online identity. On Yahoo!, you're JS133xyz and on Slashdot, you're known as KlingonB. To your mortgage company, you're jsmith123, but to your bank and online broker, you're jsmith134 (because jsmith123 was already taken). You get the idea.

Currently, each of your online identities stands independent of the others. This situation has its benefits and its drawbacks. One drawback: independent identities force you to manage all your online identities -- you must remember each identity's name and password and other information, such as your credit card number, that you've associated with each. In my case, the situation has grown so complicated that I must use an application to store and manage everything. However, each identity represents only a small portion of your online activity -- this is a benefit. Because each identity is independent, linking your activities across these identities to more clearly profile your habits online is a difficult task, thus you enjoy a small amount of anonymity. Do you want others tracking everything you do online?

Whether good or bad, the situation won't last much longer. In mid-1999, with little reaction considering the source, Microsoft announced its Passport service. Passport is a single sign-on solution built on Microsoft technology. At the time, it seemed that Microsoft would just leverage its large Hotmail user database and the intellectual property the company gained after acquiring Firefly to drive users to other Microsoft properties, such as MSN (Microsoft Network) or other partner properties. It wasn't until Microsoft unveiled .Net, announced the first services that required Passport, and clarified its plans to wire Passport into every piece of technology they control, that the industry woke up and took notice. One outcome of that awakening: the Liberty Alliance Project.

The Liberty Alliance Project: History, members, and goals

Organized and officially introduced to the world in September 2001, the Liberty Alliance Project is nothing if not ambitious. In spite of being less than half a year old, it manages to weld together 38 influential companies that represent, if you believe the marketing material, over one billion network identities. Sun Microsystems provided the organizing and motivating force behind the Liberty Alliance Project. Other notable members include the Apache Software Foundation and O'Reilly & Associates, both staunch supporters of open source software; a handful of representatives from the Fortune 500, including General Motors, Bank of America, and Sprint; and a broad collection of technology companies, such as VeriSign, RealNetworks, and Cisco. AOL Time Warner, an early hold out, eventually joined after scrapping its own plans to build a single sign-on solution leveraged by its own hefty user base.

Remarkably little detailed information, technical or nontechnical, is available about the Liberty Alliance Project. The organization seeks to define a set of standards and to create the technology necessary to build a universal identity infrastructure. Beyond the technology, it will establish the policies that govern the interactions between online communities.