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Liberty Alliance Struggles With Its Own Identity


By Alex Handy
March 1, 2007 — 
The Liberty Alliance is having an identity crisis. The group of vendors and independent developers that came together in 2001 to build standards and practices for digital identity management will be changing its tactics in 2007, due to what has been described as a proliferation of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace.

The 6-year-old project will attempt to open its processes and discussions to the public in the coming year, something that it has not done in the past. The alliance will also be seeking out other identity management projects to foster collaboration and interoperability.

“From a personal perspective, adoption [of Liberty Alliance standards and protocols] went a little bit slower than I anticipated,” said Jason Rouault, vice president of the Liberty Alliance and CTO of identity management at HP Software. “I don’t think the adoption was slowed down because it didn’t work; it was just a market education project.”

But that market is clamoring for identity solutions: At this year’s RSA Conference, a noticeable number of vendors were offering new solutions to identity problems. The Liberty Alliance, however, must fight to make its solutions known, said Roger Sullivan, Liberty Alliance management board president and vice president of identity management at Oracle.

Among the alliance’s goals for 2007 is to collaborate with existing and new identity projects.

“You’ve got OpenID, the Identity Commons, [and the Eclipse-based] Project Higgins.... There’s a reason those things are going on,” said Rouault. “They’re trying to fill a niche in the market that they think that Liberty doesn’t solve. It might be the case that Liberty doesn’t solve it, or it does and they don’t know. We want to sit down with them and talk about what we’re both doing that is synergistic.”

“One of the things I’ve seen at some conferences I attend is people trying to address problems that Liberty solved three years ago,” said Sullivan. “Shame on us for not making that information available.”

That’s why the alliance will begin a concerted push for more openness in 2007, said Sullivan. This move has been heralded by the creation of openLiberty.org, a project designed to build a repository of open source examples of Liberty Federation standards implementations. The project’s Web site was opened in January, and will serve as a code resource for developers.

“Identity management can be somewhat daunting for folks who want to roll their own solutions and who have not done it before,” Sullivan said. “I think that open source implementations of Liberty specifications can play a vital role in filling that need.”

STARS VERSUS LIBERTY
Complicating the task of the Liberty Alliance has been the confusion around Web services and the overlap between the alliance’s work and WS-* specifications, said Rouault. “The

WS-* set of specifications are, in essence, plumbing for Web services. The Liberty work in Web services is really about the efficient profiling of how you do identity-based Web services in a secure manner,” he said. “In some cases where specifications don’t exist, then we add that into the [WS-*] framework. They’re not two separate stacks at this point, though they might get positioned that way.”

Said Sullivan: “We think that WS-* is going to be a force as it moves into the open standard industry. There needs to be a bridge between those two industries. We think there’s a valid role we can fill that needs to be done.... Customers need to deploy both [WS-* and open Web services standards]. If they don’t deploy both, they will most certainly be working with customers who use both.”


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