A Brief Introduction to Liberty

For the man on the street, the businesswoman in her o ce, the shopper or investor at home, identity on the Internet is a straightforward idea with a complex solution. Using Amazon, there is one sign-on and password; using United Airlines, another; connecting to L.L. Bean, yet another, and with Fidelity Investments, a fourth. Within the enterprise, each service | on-line corporate travel, 401(k) account management, employee bene ts | may require its own sign-on and password. The same holds for business-to-business interactions. The result is cumbersome, the user experience o putting. The rst challenge of Web services is a simple and secure identity mechanism, the second, and equally important, concern is privacy protection. Single sign-on and federated network identity (a system for binding multiple accounts for a given user) are key to solving this. A federated system allows businesses to manage their own resources including customer data. Federated network identity enables consumers to retain some control over which companies have access to their information. The purpose of Liberty is to develop technical speci cations for network identity in a federated environment. It is a project of the Liberty Alliance, a group organized to establish open standards for network-based identity interactions. Developing single-sign-on architecture for federated network identity system in the 2002 Internet environment when the only common Web security tool is SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is technically challenging. Doing so without controlling the most important tool for user interaction | the browser