The name Project Liberty could easily be mistaken for a codename given by the French in the Nineteenth Century during the construction of the Statue of Liberty.
And while Project Liberty does not have quite such a symbolic connotation, it represents one the industry's most imaginative and exiting projects for business and IT in years.
Addressing delegates at ITWeb's Brainstorm 2002 'Restoring faith in IT' conference, held last week at Computer Faire in Gallagher Estate, Midrand, Stefano Mattiello, managing director of Sun Microsystems SA, emphasised the industry's need for a single sign-on network identity for users, based on an open federated model.
He explains that with the help of a single sign-on structure, companies will be able to understand their customers better, which in turn enables them to deliver new and improved levels of service.
"The Liberty Alliance and Project Liberty represent just that - an open and independent model that sees one protocol enabling people to use one user name and one password, to access information not only on the Web but on an entire network."
Most people use various services with various passwords during the day. "People's personal identities do not, however, change with every service used - you're still the same person with the same ID or passport."
So why can't this also apply to the use of networks and the Internet? Many believe that creating a single sign-on will take away individuals' rights to privacy and will leave them vulnerable to security onslaughts.
Even more importantly, sceptics feel it will leave user identities in the hands of one vendor/operator that controls access to all information points. "The fear is that this operator will be the single point of failure, which subsequently means that if downtime is experienced, users won't be able to access anything," says Mattiello.
What makes the Liberty Alliance and its Project Liberty so different? Its key differential is that as it is a multi-industry business alliance, it is not under the control of a single company. The current alliance represents over a billion Network Identities. Charter members include MasterCard, Visa, HP, Sony, GM, Nokia, AOL, Time Warner, NTT DoCoMo, Sun, France Telecom, Cisco and United Airlines.
The project aims to:
* Simplify business partnerships on the Internet;
* Allow businesses and consumers to better manage their data on their own business terms, not somebody else's; and
* Increase a user's consumption of network services.
The Liberty Alliance does not aim to control user sign-ons, but to provide them with one language or one protocol that enables people to safely use a sign-on anywhere on the Internet or Web.
Explains Mattiello: "When you're travelling overseas, in most cases you would have activated active roaming on your cellphone. This means that as soon as you step off a plane it will start searching for the local service provider, which will then interact with your service provider to verify that you have roaming. "The greatest part of this is that the verification process is automatic. This is what Project Liberty aims to achieve - to develop a protocol or industry standard that is incorporated by all, automatically, while not using your identity without your permission."
The Liberty Alliance is currently working on Phase 1 - the specifications, which will be released in July.
Any company is welcome to join the Liberty Alliance. For more information, go to www.projectliberty.org.
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