IdentityMeme.org

The Liberty Alliance will be holding a workshop in Redwood Shores, CA on 22-Jan-2006. Perhaps the event catch-phrase “Liberty 2.0″ can be perceived as jumping on the arguably overwrought “2.0″ meme coursing through the web these days, but we did in fact recently complete the ID-WSF v2.0 specification set, which I’d noted in these pages earlier this fall.

The event will be quite informative for those wishing to learn more about Identity-based Web Services, with Conor, Eve, JohnK, PaulM, and Mary Ruddy speaking.

Here’s relevant pointers…

Announcing Liberty 2.0 Workshop on Jan. 22 in Redwood Shores, CA

Workshop Agenda

It’s been a long haul, but it’s finally out the door..

Liberty Alliance Releases Final Version of ID-WSF 2.0 Web Services Standards (a comprehensive press release)

The specs themselves are here, and a very useful diagram illustrating the various high-level entity relationships in a deployment is here. If you mouse-over the boxes in the latter diagram, you’ll get a pop-up definition for that box’s role in the abstract deployment architecture, taken from the glossary (plus a link to the glossary). I’m tickled by this because I’m the glossary’s editor, and it seems that glossaries are often overlooked. But in any case, I edited or contributed to many of the specs, so am glad it’s finally out.

So, this was a pretty dry post, like most of mine seem to be. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to get some humor in here. But in the meantime, there’s folks who manage humor just fine. See Paul Madsen’s post wrt ID-WSFv2.0, for example

A whole passel of folks contributed to getting this release done and out. Those of us who wrote chunks of specs got our names on the specs, which is nice, but there’s a non-trivial chunk of that passel who did yeoman’s work helping this stuff get done, many of whom work for IEEE-ISTO, and I thank them for their contributions.

A new Liberty / SAML opensource project has just emerged — ZXID.org — with an emphasis on embedding the identity functionality in the “application layer” and supporting Perl and PHP.

From the web page:

ZXID project has currently (Aug 2006) three outputs

• libzxid
  • A C library for supporting SAML 2.0, including federated Single Sign-On
• zxid
  • A C program that implements a SAML Service Provider (SP) as a CGI script
• Net::SAML
  • A Perl module wrapping libzxid. Also zxid.pl, that implements SP in mod_perl environment, is supplied.

There’s a bunch more information in the PDF readme file.

Check it out.

The Liberty Alliance will present the IDentity Deployment of the Year Award (IDDY, pronounced EYE-D) before the keynote at the DIDW (DigitalID World) conference this September. The announcement and nomination page is here…

IDentity Deployment of the Year Award

This sounds like a good idea to not only promote the “online identity” topic itself, but also spread some recognition for the folks who do the usually behind-the-scenes deployment work.

The thoughtful Roger Sullivan makes his blogosphere appearance..

From the desk of Roger Sullivan…

Welcome Roger!

The inimitable Conor Cahill has succumbed to peer pressure and is now blogging…

Conor’s Web Log of Esoterica

Welcome Conor

The Liberty Alliance recently announced availability of:

ID-WSF 2.0 (DRAFT), the Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF), Draft Release 3

We’re getting very close to completing ID-WSFv2.0. I expect the delta between this Draft Release 3 specification set and the WSFv2.0 “final” spec set to be pretty small.

If you are interested in secure, identity-enabled, SOAP-based web services frameworks, you should take a look at this spec set. Rather than being a “framework of fameworks”, this spec set is directly implementable without further profiling. Indeed, ID-WSFv1.x is implemented, tested, and available from multiple vendors.

Liberty Alliance is hosting an Identity Web Services Framework Developer’s Workshop in San Francisco on 12-Jun-2006, ahead of the Burton Catalyst conference. It’s free, although the registration cutoff is 10-Jun. There will be several presentations by ID-WSF architects, including an ID-WSF overview (by Conor Cahill), a People Service overview (by Hubert Le Van Gong), and a use-case-driven exploration of the policy and consent pieces of ID-WSF (by Peter Davis). The presentations are followed by a Q

There will be an “Identity Open Space (IOS)” Unconference held in Vancouver BC in Jul-2006, during the same week as the Liberty Alliance Project holds their quarterly members’ meeting in the same town. In fact, all Identity Open Space attendees are invited to attend the Vancouver Liberty members’ meeting!

This IOS event is billed as a co-production of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) Organizers (nominally Kaliya Hamlin, Doc Searles, and Phil Windley) and the Liberty Alliance Project.

This idea of co-locating an IOS event with the Liberty meeting is a great idea for several reasons, not the least of which is that it fosters convergence in the Identity space, and Identity is what Liberty has been all about from the beginning.

I attended the IIW2006 conference and found it to be quite interesting, stimulating, informative, and a great idea exchange venue.

Kaliya’s blog entry about IOS Vancouver — also known as “IdentityOSVan” — is HERE.

Johannes Ernst also blogged about it, entitling it (amusingly enough) “Un-Liberty?“.

Very much unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend due to overlap with a long-planned family vacation.

The SAMLv1 effort began in earnest in Jan-2001. The Liberty Alliance was kicked off by Sun Microsystems in late Summer 2001 and got rolling by Dec-2001. Official, “OASIS Standard” SAMLv1 specs were published in Nov-2002, and the initial Liberty ID-FFv1 (Identity Federation Framework) specs were published in summer 2001 (based on SAMLv1 drafts), with v1.1 in Jan 2003 (based on OASIS-Standard SAMLv1.0). Subsequently, ID-FFv1.x and SAMLv1.x were formally converged to become SAMLv2.0 — which was issued as an OASIS-Standard spec in March 2005.

It’s now April 2006. The above specs are implemented in various commercial and open-source products (e.g. SAMLv2.0 conformance-tested products). What’s up with deployment? Various people have claimed that “those specs are too complicated and aren’t user-centric, and there isn’t any wide deployment of them” (to sort of paraphrase, but nearly quote).

Well, the Liberty Alliance has done some navel-gazing about this, beginning in earnest last year, and we’ve now published both a “Market Adoption” page (to be periodically updated), and have launched a quarterly “Executive Newsletter” — this first issue of which focuses on adoption.

It looks like deployments are occuring and momentum is building (the term “billions” is used), and we’re proving the above quote wrong. Check it out.