The document deals with issues such as quality standards, risk management, liability and dispute-resolution policies. Specifically, it includes support for security assertions markup language 2.0 from the organization for Advancement of Structured Information Sciences. SAML defines a framework for communicating security and identity information between computer systems.
“Mobility is a given in today’s society but creates tough standards,” said James Governor of IT analyst firm RedMonk. “As governments overreach themselves in creating new investigatory powers and businesses farm customer data without adequate protections, privacy becomes increasingly important.”
“Successful identity management has become a critical factor in application development and the necessary foundation for deploying all web services,” said George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance’s management board and director of Intel’s Visualization and Trust Lab. “These specification provide a blueprint for driving convergence between federated identity and web services specifications, a necessary step to complete interoperability.”
Timo Skytta, vice president of the Liberty Alliance Project and senior manager at Nokia, said the Mobile Business Guidelines are designed to help service providers address privacy issues by establishing a platform-independent, service-oriented architecture. Skytta added that support for SAML 2.0 reflects the group’s commitment to integrating open standards in its specifications to help drive a convergence of identity standards.
“Improved security with privacy-enabling features, cost-effectiveness from healthy vendor competition, rapid new service deployment, enhanced user friendliness and interoperability are all ingredients needed to be successful in today’s online environment,” Skytta said.
The Liberty Alliance Project is made up of more than 150 member companies and organizations, including more than 50 percent of the world’s mobile device makers and mobile network infrastructure providers.
