Liberty Alliance announced the release of the first versions of the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) and the Identity Governance Framework (IGF)
June 2008 by Marc Jacob
Liberty Alliance announced the release of the first versions of the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) and the Identity Governance Framework (IGF), two standardized frameworks designed to fill cross-industry requirements for driving trust into enterprise and user-driven Web 2.0 identity-enabled applications. As you may recall, the IAF is based on the work of the EAP, which merged into Liberty Alliance last year. The IGF was submitted to Liberty Alliance for further development (market requirements, standards and open source implementations at OpenLiberty.org) during 1Q 07.
With these releases, Liberty Alliance is delivering an important business and policy stack to fill industry requirements for standardized business and policy policy criteria in order to better manage the many identity relationships and compliance issues spanning organizations and applications. Senior Liberty Alliance spokespersons and industry analysts are available to discuss the significance of today’s news.
We’re issuing three releases — an umbrella release and then independent IAF and IGF releases. There is also a Q and A available to support this news. Please let me know if you would like me to send the Q and A your way. While all three releases follow, a couple bullets at the highest level on each:
– IAF - Developed under the leadership of Frank Villavicencio, director, Citigroup Global Transaction Services and Alex Popowycz, vice president, Fidelity Investments, the IAF fills cross industry requirements for policy criteria to allow organizations to link identity systems together based on a uniform definition of the security and privacy risks associated with four levels of identity assurance. Liberty Alliance intentends to launch an IAF identity assurance accreditation and certification program during 3Q 08.
“The Liberty Identity Assurance Framework provides federation operators and organizations in every sector with an industry standard for moving multi-protocol federations ahead based on trusted identity assurance levels,” said Frank Villavicencio, co-chair of the Liberty Identity Assurance Expert Group and director, Citigroup Global Transaction Services. “The IAF delivers the business and policy foundation developers, businesses and system integrators can now begin to leverage to more easily build and deploy a wide variety of new federated services and enterprise-grade Web 2.0 applications.”
– IGF - With standards developed within Liberty’s Technology Expert Group and open source implementations within OpenLiberty.org, the IGF is the industry’s first programmatic and auditable open standards-based framework. It helps organizations meet regulatory requirements by allowing enterprises to more easily determine and control how identity information, including personally identifiable information (PII), is used and stored across diverse systems, helping to ensure the information is easily auditable and not abused, compromised or misplaced.
“The first release of the Liberty Identity Governance Framework is a significant proof point in demonstrating how Liberty Alliance is committed to delivering the policy-based systems organizations need to build and deploy more successful enterprise and Web 2.0 applications,” said Brett McDowell executive director, Liberty Alliance. “Liberty Alliance and OpenLiberty.org welcome participation from the identity community to help collaboratively drive the next version of IGF.”