Liberty Alliance adds members, sets deadline

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By Sam Costello

SAN JOSE, California (IDG) -- The Liberty Alliance, the group led by Sun Microsystems that is working on an alternative technology to Microsoft's Passport, has announced 11 new members and set a deadline for completing the first technical specifications of its system for authenticating users on the Web.

The new members include EarthLink, EDS, Nextel Communications, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Schlumberger Sema, VeriSign, and Visa International, the group announced here at the RSA Conference 2002.

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The group plans to publish its first round of specifications by the middle of 2002, says Eric Dean, who chairs the Liberty Alliance and is chief information officer of United Air Lines.

Those specifications will focus on achieving a basic goal of the alliance: making it possible for an end user to log on at one Web site and then have that log-in transferred automatically to other Web sites selected by the user that are part of the Liberty Alliance system. No account data will actually be shared among the sites, Dean says; rather, only the fact that the user has logged on and been authenticated will be shared.

Dean stresses that the first specification represents only the beginning of the Liberty Alliance's work.

"It lays a groundwork upon which richer capabilities can be built," he says.

Future specifications will need to tackle tougher issues like privacy, Dean says. He adds that "the privacy issue is absolutely at the center of what we want to do."

A Passport alternative

The Liberty Alliance was formed in late September as a response to Microsoft's Passport user authentication system. Sun and other founding members formed the group to counter what they saw as Microsoft's attempt to dominate the single sign-on market. Passport stores user information like the name, address, phone number, and e-mail address, and can also store such data as bank account or credit card numbers for making e-commerce transactions.

Dean disputes the idea that Liberty Alliance is a direct challenge to Microsoft. "From the beginning, we were not interested in a battle with anybody," he says.

He says he would like to see Passport be completely interoperable with the Liberty Alliance, whether Microsoft is a member or not. Microsoft has recently expressed willingness to work with it.

Though the Alliance's specification won't be available until mid-year, the group will be adding new members before then, Dean says. Within the next two months it will change its composition somewhat to allow nonprofit and public interest groups to become members, he says.