The Liberty Alliance today released the first versions of two key specifications aimed at taking some of the work and doubt out of federated identity schemes.

The Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) and Identity Governance Framework (IGF) are aimed at driving identity system policy to better manage identity relationships and define how privacy is being protected in information technology enterprises. IAF is a set of technology-neutral policies to help organizations make decisions about trust in identity credentials without reinventing the wheel each time. IGF is a technical specification for defining privacy issues based on the Extensible Markup Language.

The frameworks follow on the development of the widely adopted Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), said Roger Sullivan, Liberty Alliance president and vice president of identity management at Oracle Corp.

Read the complete article by William Jackson at Government Computer News.