Title: Liberty Alliance Overview

Authors: Brett McDowell

^^Abstract
The Liberty Alliance has been developing network identity standards since its inception in 2001. Technical standards are developed to support well-defined use cases of real-world requirements, as defined in a needs analysis phase executed by our enterprise, vendor and public sector membership base. Driven out of such analysis, two frameworks have been defined by the Liberty Alliance: Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF) and Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF). Identity Service Interface Specifications (ID-SIS), as defined by niche subsets of our membership, are developed to enable specific application types to interoperate across multiple ID-WSF deployments. Examples of publicly available ID-SIS specifications are Contact Book, Geolocation, Presence, Personal Profile, Employee Profile, and the recently announced Messaging work. At the core of our work is the understanding that privacy, regulatory compliance, adherence to deployment best practices, and user-control over attribute exchange must be a primary focus.

In this presentation, we'll explore the architectural framework of Liberty Federation as well as Liberty Identity Web Services, focusing on the inherent principles of privacy and user-controlled identity, defined by the requirements gathering phase, which drove features and functionality of these frameworks. Driving through the real-world requirements we'll explore how they were applied to the technical standards development phase, specifically looking at user-controlled identity principles, identity-based service discovery, permissions-based attribute sharing, user interaction service, the Liberty Client, and the other core components of the frameworks. We will also discuss Liberty's roadmap for the next release of the Web Services Framework. Together, these frameworks, plus the Service Interface Specifications, comprise a complete Identity Architecture that is available today and being implemented globally by many leading organizations.