The Liberty Alliance, which is developing models for the sharing of identities across corporate boundaries, announced Tuesday that eight vendors have passed its first interoperability test based on an emerging identity standard.
The test focused on version 2.0 of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard and the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework 1.1 specification. Eight participants – The Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute, Ericsson, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, Sun, Symlabs and Trustgenix – all passed the first interoperability test the Liberty Alliance has conducted for multi-vendor SAML 2.0 interoperability.
In February at the RSA security conference, 13 vendors – including Computer Associates, Entrust, HP, Oracle, RSA Security, Sun and Trustgenix – staged a SAML 2.0 interoperability demonstration that also involved the federal government and its E-Authentication Initiative. And in July, The Burton Group staged an interoperability demonstration among 14 vendors using multiple protocols, including SAML 2.0, the Liberty Alliance specifications, the Shibboleth protocols developed for Internet2, and the WS-Federation protocol developed by IBM and Microsoft.
The bottom line, experts say, is that vendors are proving interoperability among real products just as early adopters are beginning to get serious about the technology.
In addition, the Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth are incorporating the SAML 2.0 specification into their work and Microsoft is supporting the SAML token in its identity platform.
As part of the Liberty Interoperable Testing Program each vendor must complete tests against scripts and various identity “scenarios.” The vendors must demonstrate interoperability with two other randomly chosen vendors participating in the event.
Roger Sullivan, the chair of Liberty’s interoperability program, said the vendors went beyond the two-vendor minimum and completed nearly 97% of a matrix that had every vendor testing against every other vendor.
“This is the first time we have been able to accomplish that thorough of a matrix testing process,” says Sullivan. “The message is that we have a set of vendors that are ready to sell products. The other part of the message that is not so apparent is how smooth this test ran.”
The test was conducted by the IEEE’s Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO) July 25-29. The Liberty Alliance plans to hold the next test in November in Tokyo.
