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May 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

OASIS considers identity management

TAGS: Web Services

OASIS has formed a committee to advance the WS-Federation specification for identity management in Web services, meaning the technology now goes through the process of becoming an OASIS standard.

WS-Federation seeks to extend identity management by enabling federations of trust. It is part of the OASIS effort to provide for standard security mechanisms in Web services. Version 1.1 of the specification will be contributed to the new WS-Federation Technical Committee, OASIS said this week.

"WS-Federation is a method for expressing and managing trust relationships among parties sharing identity data," said James Bryce Clark, director of standards development for OASIS, in a statement released by OASIS. "This specification was intended for programs that use the WS-Trust OASIS Standard for security token exchange, the WS-Policy family of methods for describing constraints and rules, and the WS-Security OASIS Standard for associating security content with SOAP messages."

"This set of specifications is designed to compose, together with other related standards (including WS-Reliable Messaging and the WS-Transaction OASIS Standard), as a seamless and exclusive stack of specifications for secure and reliable Web services," Bryce said.

Organizations and business partners will be able to collaborate more safely and smoothly with WS-Federation, said Paul Cotton of Microsoft, who is convening the technical committee, in the OASIS statement.

WS-Federation was developed by BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, IBM, Layer 7, Microsoft, Novell, and VeriSign

Posted by Paul Krill on May 3, 2007 10:54 AM

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