IBM, Microsoft advance Web spec

Building on previous efforts to create a framework for secure and interoperable Web services, IBM, Microsoft, and several other companies last week detailed a specification to simplify identity management.

The proposed WS-Federation promises to allow developers to manage and establish trust relationships across companies and domains that use different types of security solutions.

“This will let companies tie their identity systems to each other in a way that lets them trade information back and forth about users and systems, and then federate that data across the Internet no matter what security infrastructure they are using,” said Steven Van Roekel, Microsoft’s director of Web services in Redmond, Wash.

One advantage is that administrators can authenticate a single employee only once and allow that employee to work with both internal and external Web services.

“This will provide a way for trust relationships to be established whether users are coming from just a browser-based client or from a client that has a lot of functions within its Web services,” said Carla Norsworthy, director of dynamic e-business technologies at IBM in Somers, N.Y. She said customers can carry out federated identity without requiring users to remember several passwords.

The group hopes compatibility with the competing Liberty Alliance efforts will be attractive.

“[WS-Federation] gives people a way to migrate over if they choose to adopt [the Liberty Alliance specification] either completely or just specific instances of it,” said Hemma Prafullchandra, a strategic architect at VeriSign, one of WS-Federation’s co-authors.

Some developers were skeptical about WS-Federation.

“The promise to tie together these independent islands of authentication is pure marketing hype that nobody needs right now. This is just another letter for the Web service alphabet soup mix that will tend to confuse more than help enterprises struggling to secure Web services,” said Eugene Kuznetsov, CTO and chairman of DataPower Technology in Cambridge, Mass.