EAP Merges Into Liberty Alliance

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. -- 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.”

The Liberty Alliance Project