Liberty Alliance

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 Websites. This federated approach did not require the user to re-authenticate and can support privacy controls established by the user.

The Liberty Alliance subsequently released two more versions of the Identity Federation Framework, and then in November 2003, Liberty contributed its final version of the specification, ID-FF 1.2, to OASIS. This contribution formed the basis for SAML 2.0. By 2007, industry analyst firm Gartner claimed that SAML had gained wide acceptance in the community.

Liberty Alliance, releasing the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) in April 2004 for deploying and managing identity-based web services. Applications included geolocation, contact book, calendar, mobile messaging and People Service, for managing social applications such as bookmarks, blogs, calendars, photo sharing and instant messaging in a secure and privacy-respecting federated social network. In a 2008 marketing report recommended considering it for federation.

The alliance introduced a certification program in 2003, designed to test commercial and open source products against published standards to assure base levels of interoperability between products. In 2007, the US General Services Administration began requiring this certification for participating in the US E-Authentication Identity Federation.

In January 2007, the alliance announced a project for open-source software developers building identity-based applications. OpenLiberty.org was a portal where developers can collaborate and access tools and information to develop applications based on alliance standards. In November 2008, OpenLiberty released an open source application programming interface called ArisID.