ZDNet has an article by Dan Farber on the recent Digital ID World conference.
Federated identity management, which supports multiple entities connected within a circle of trust, is one of the major initiatives growing out of Web services that will provide substantial benefits to corporations and consumers.
On the current horizon, SAML is in the lead and gaining momentum with lots of early adoption, said Jamie Lewis, president and research chair of the Burton Group. SAML, an XML-based framework for exchanging security information, is core to the Liberty Alliance effort, and the WS-* group has pledged to support it in its Web services specifications. Microsoft announced that it would support SAML tokens, and IBM is shipping SAML as part of its solution.
The most interesting and promising development I encountered at Digital ID World was Ping Identity. The 12-person company, led by CEO Andre Durand, offers SourceID an open source platform for deploying federated single sign-on or enabling federated identity applications.
Always On adds:
Doc Searls rapped it out thusly: the world is being turned upside down with the notion of one’s Digital Identity.
At the core of everything is MyIdentity – the individual’s profile and behavior data which before has been thought of as “account information”. The next level out in Doc’s world view is OurIdentity, where one’s relationship to others actually takes on importance – as well. It’s those relationships and the importance of the individual which makes the world a different place.
On the outside looking in is the status quo – TheirIdentity. This status quo actually believes that they own their membership databases. That all those names (and the clicks associated with them) are their companies family jewels, their base I.P. assets. The BigCos, government, power mongers and power elite who think they control membership databases, individuals and that worst of all phrases – consumers – are about to see the ground shift underneath them.
Phil Windley has more reports [1 2].
I wrote about identity management recently.
