New ID Guidelines

The Liberty Alliance Project released their new guidelines for federated identity management on Tuesday. The global consortium helps organizations manage business, legal and privacy standards regarding the deployment of both open federated identity standards and identity-based web standards.

Federated identity management delivers the benefit of simplified sign-on to users by allowing them to “link” elements of their identity between online accounts without storing all of their personal information in one place. This increases security and delivers better identity control. With a federated network identity approach, users authenticate once while still retaining control over their personal information as they travel to and from various Internet sites within a Circle of Trust.

One of the biggest issues this group faces is in the “Circles of Trust.” The Circles are the legal and contractual frameworks governing federation between organizations. The guidelines they’ve developed will set the standards for “Circles of Trust” and their Public Policy Expert Group helped hammer out those guidelines.

“Companies have a lot to consider as they move to establish Circles of Trust,” said Michael Aisenberg, chair of Liberty’s PPEG and director of government relations, VeriSign, Inc. “We’ve created these guidelines to jump-start the business conversations policy decision managers need to have when creating Circles of Trust and to help organizations learn from our experience in developing open federated identity solutions.”

Organizations developing Circles of Trust need to address, among other things, what type of information will be shared among companies, how and when it will be shared, what security procedures will be used to maintain the confidentiality of such information and how participants may join or leave the Circle of Trust. Liberty’s Business and Policy Deployment Guidelines will help policy decision managers better manage these issues in order to develop Circles of Trust faster and more successfully.

“Policy decision makers around the world continuously point to business, legal and policy concerns as the biggest barriers to implementing industry ‘circles of trust’ or federations,” said Dan Blum, Senior VP and Research Director at Burton Group. “Resources designed to address these issues will be welcomed by organizations looking to deploy federated identity solutions.”


Aisenberg gave examples of Liberty members who have “Circles of Trust” in place and that list includes Bluewin, General Motors, Fidelity Investments, France Telecom and NTT.

For policy makers working on these very issues, this will help tremendously. In many companies, it becomes necessary to work with other companies for supplies and various other reasons. These Circles of Trust make it not only easier but also safer at the same time.

Guidelines