IBM is pushing interoperability as a solution to enterprise identity management and authentication woes. In Version 6.2 of IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, the company has integrated a number of user-focused identity management technologies and frameworks, including OpenID, Microsoft Windows CardSpace and the Eclipse Higgins identity framework.

When we set out late last year to review comprehensive SOA appliances that provide XML security, acceleration, transformation, and parsing, we worried that we wouldn't find all this goodness in one box. We also didn't foresee the speed at which this space would coalesce.Since Cisco Systems acquired Reactivity last year, the XML appliance market, for the most part, has been quiet. But next door, Layer 7 Technologies and Vordel continue to be aggressive players in the XML security gateway area.

Third Annual Event Features Deployment, Emerging and Multi-Protocol Application Categories Liberty Alliance – May 8, 2008 - Liberty Alliance, the global identity community working to build a more trust-worthy internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today announced a call for nominations for the 2008 IDDY Awards. The IDDY Award (IDentity Deployment of the Year) recognizes identity-based applications built using Liberty Federation (SAML 2.0), Liberty Web Services, Liberty People Service and Liberty Advanced Client specifications.

OASIS Web Services Security describes how to use SAML with SOAP web services. The signed SAML Assertion should be added to the SOAP header... and so on. However, there is no specification that describes how to add SAML to REST web services. The reason that there is no such specification is simple: REST is not a standard, but it's an architectural style. So it's impossible to define standard that is not based on standard.

The GridShib Project has announced the release of GridShib for Globus Toolkit v0.6.0. This is an exciting development, as GridShib software allows for powerful new authorization architectures in which access control decisions are made based on attributes obtained from many different sources.