Prior suspect that Liberty will be looking to the Security Assertation Markup Language (SAML), a proposed standard from the OASIS Security Services technical committee, now seems definitive.
I have three independant confirmations from Alliance founders, that SAML indeed is the security information protocol of choice. It is, however, also quite safe to bet that Liberty's specific requirements of operating a shared public identity space with specific focus on merchants, will force extensions upon the standard.
[Digital Identity]
The Liberty Alliance Project counts several Prominent US Financial Services companies such as: American Express, Fidelity, Bank of America and CitiBank (Hmm, what about todays announcement regarding Passport?? Betting on two horses I guess.). The project aims to setup a large federated Identity Service to compete with MS Passport. So far little is concrete, but it sounds like they might be using SAML, which certainly would make sense.
I've seen plenty of anti microsoft alliances before and I must admit I'm a bit sceptical if they actually will get past the vapour ware stage. But I do hope they do, as no one wants to see MS own that market. (Of course they are probably the one company suited to do so).
Financial companies will primarily be interested in Liberty for retail apps. There is little sense in using them for internal applications. I can see larger banks creating SAML interfaces into existing authentication frameworks. Data providers will probably eventually look into using it as well for authentication of their services.
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