Members of the OASIS consortium have formed a new committee to advance the WS-Federation specification through the international standards process. WS-Federation aims to extend the scope of identity management, enabling federations of trust. Version 1.1 of the specification, which was created by a cooperative of eight companies, will be contributed to the new OASIS WS-Federation Technical Committee for advancement and input from the broader community.

“It's good to see WS-Federation submitted to a standards body,” said Gerry Gebel, Identity and Privacy Strategies service director at Burton Group. “We're hopeful that this move will make convergence of existing standards more likely since OASIS has also produced WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, SAML, XACML, and SPML.”

“Organizations and business partners will be able to collaborate more safely and smoothly with WS-Federation,” noted Paul Cotton of Microsoft, convener of the OASIS WS-Federation Technical Committee. “Today, it often takes weeks for a company to set up user accounts and access privileges to enable their partner organizations’ staff to safely gain access to shared materials. When a project is complete, all that time and effort must be repeated in order to revoke the partner’s accounts. WS-Federation allows user accounts to continue to be owned, stored, and managed by the users' companies, and shared as needed with partner organizations, instead of relinquishing control to them or creating duplicate copies.”

The OASIS WS-Federation Technical Committee will work to simplify interactions between the participants of a federation. The group will advance capabilities for structuring and acquiring federation metadata, sign-out notifications, and the use of pseudonym and identity mapping and attribute services. In addition, the Committee will enable brokered trust relationships and distributed authentication and authorization to be used in browser-based scenarios.

“WS-Federation is a method for expressing and managing trust relationships among parties sharing identity data,” explained James Bryce Clark, director of standards development for 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.”

Representatives of Active Endpoints, AmberPoint, BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, Forum Systems, HP, IBM, IONA, Novell, Microsoft, Progress Software, Red Hat, SOA Software, TIBCO, VeriSign, webMethods, and others make up the OASIS WS-Federation Technical Committee. Participation remains open to all companies, non-profit groups, governments, academic institutions, and individuals.

The WS-Federation Technical Committee will operate under the Royalty Free on RAND Terms mode, as defined by the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights Policy. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committee's work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment.