News
Brett McDowell, Liberty’s executive director, will introduce the Liberty Identity Assurance Framework (IAF)
February 2009 by Marc Jacob
Liberty Alliance announced that Brett McDowell, Liberty’s executive director, will introduce the Liberty Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) and corresponding accreditation and certification program to the financial services community next month at the March 2009 BITS & FSTC Summit in Sarasota, FL. McDowell will discuss how standardized identity assurance levels outlined in the IAF are being used in the identity sector today.
The IAF details four identity assurance levels to ease and speed the process of linking trusted identity-enabled applications together based on standardized business rules and security risks associated with each level of identity assurance.
The framework has been developed within the Liberty Alliance Identity Assurance Expert Group (under the leadership of BT, Citi, Fidelity Investments, Wells Fargo and the US GSA) with input from members of the global financial services, government, healthcare, IT and telecommunications sectors. The policy-based framework removes the need for organizations to “reinvent the wheel” each time they need to make trust decisions about the acceptance of identity credentials, which could span from SAML to X.509, when building and expanding identity systems. This is because organizations adopting the IAF immediately understand how to address the business and policy challenges involved in adding new members and services to federations based on standardized identity assurance criteria.
