WASHINGTON, September 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Electronic Authentication Partnership (EAP) and Liberty Alliance Form 
New Global Expert Group to Drive Trusted Federations and Identity Assurance 
Internationally

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more 
trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today 
announced it has formed a new expert group to deliver the Liberty Trust 
Framework, an organizational framework designed to fill industry requirements 
for standardized identity assurance criteria for use in a broad range of 
federation scenarios. Liberty's Identity Assurance Expert Group (IAEG) was 
established by the recent merge of the Electronic Authentication Partnership 
(EAP) into Liberty Alliance, and consists of representatives from the 
worldwide financial services, government, healthcare and service provider 
sectors working collaboratively to release the Liberty Trust Framework for 
public review and input later this year.

The Liberty Trust Framework will remove a major barrier to global
inter-federation deployments: the complexity of assessing the level of
identity assurance among all organizations participating in federated
relationships. Currently, different federations have varying policies and
processes governing identity operations, the interpretation of which adds to
the cost and complexity of deploying assured identity services. The Liberty
Trust Framework will provide a standard set of criteria so that identity
transactions, with assurance requirements ranging from leaving a comment on a
blog to high-value financial transactions, can take place based on a standard
framework for managing identity assurance levels and associated business
processes and technologies. With common criteria for determining accurate
identities in place, the Liberty Trust Framework will make it easier to bring
new members into existing federations as well as simplify how federations
themselves can interoperate.

Liberty's IAEG is co-chaired by Jane Hennessy, Senior Vice President,
Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., and Michael Sessa, Executive Director, Postsecondary
Electronic Standards Council (PESC), with founding members including
representatives from Adobe, BT, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland,
Fidelity Investments, HP, PESC, SanDisk, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs, the US
GSA and Wells Fargo. The IAEG is leveraging Liberty's diverse membership, the
work of its global expert and special interest groups (SIGs) such as the
eGovernment, eHealth, Identity Theft Prevention and Japan SIGs, and
leadership in addressing the technology, business and privacy aspects of
digital identity management to collaboratively drive the development of the
Liberty Trust Framework.

"Today's news is about members of the global identity community coming
together to develop a universal framework for building and managing
federations based on identity assurances and a foundation of trust," said
Roger Sullivan, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice
president of Oracle Identity Management. "With the technologies for
wide-scale federation in place, the Liberty Trust Framework provides the
necessary business structure that will allow organizations of all sizes and
in every market sector to better manage and protect identity information
across all identity federations."

Extending the work of the EAP and US E-Authentication Federation

Initial major contributions to the Liberty Trust Framework are coming
from the Trust Framework of the EAP and the Credential Assessment Framework
of the US E-Authentication Federation. Liberty Alliance acknowledges the
importance of these contributions in allowing the IAEG to rapidly create the
Liberty Trust Framework. The Framework will be defined in a way that scales,
empowers business processes and benefits individual users of identity
services among federations potentially supporting billions of simultaneous
transactions across devices, industries and regions.

"We are very pleased that work of the EAP is moving forward within
Liberty Alliance where individuals and organizations from around the world
can participate in driving successful inter-federations forward," said Sessa.
"We encourage the global identity community to join Liberty's new expert
group to help organizations worldwide better address the business and
technical issues involved in building trusted inter-federations."

A call for participation in the development of the Liberty Trust
Framework

"The formation of the Liberty Alliance Identity Assurance Expert Group
helps to ensure the broadest possible industry support for advancing online
identity assurance interoperability," said Hennessy. "Liberty Alliance
welcomes the participation of individuals and organizations to collaborate on
developing the next generation of resources and tools designed to reduce the
complexity and costs of identity assurance among identity federations."

IAEG is Liberty's fifth expert group, joining the Business Marketing
Expert Group (BMEG), Technology Expert Group (TEG), Public Policy Expert
Group (PPEG) and Strong Authentication Expert Group (SAEG). The development
of the Liberty Trust Framework within Liberty Alliance will be based on the
Liberty model of creating open, secure and interoperable identity standards,
business and policy deployment guidelines and best practices for managing
privacy in a collaborative environment where all organizations and individual
members are invited to participate. This proven approach helps to ensure the
output of Liberty Alliance meets real world business and user requirements
for interoperable, secure and privacy-respecting digital identity management
solutions. More information about Liberty's IAEG is available by visiting
http://projectliberty.org/liberty/strategic_initiatives/identity_assurance

About Liberty Alliance

Liberty Alliance is the only global identity organization with a
membership base that includes technology vendors, consumer service providers
and educational and government organizations working together to build a more
trusted Internet by addressing the technology, business and privacy aspects
of digital identity management. The Liberty Alliance Management Board
consists of representatives from AOL, Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, France
Telecom, HP, Intel, Novell, NTT, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Liberty
Alliance works with identity organizations worldwide to ensure all voices are
included in the global identity discussion and regularly holds and
participates in public events designed to advance the harmonization and
interoperability of CardSpace, Liberty Federation (SAML 2.0), Liberty Web
Services, OpenID and WS specifications. More information about Liberty
Alliance as well as information about how to join many of its public groups
and mail lists is available at www.projectliberty.org

CONTACT:
    Russ DeVeau
    Liberty Alliance
    +1-508-487-6102 - Office
    +1-908-251-1549 - Mobile
    russ@projectliberty.org
    russ deveau @ comcast dot net (no spaces)
    AOL IM (Russ DeVeau): devcommruss



Web site: http://www.projectliberty.org