Imagine a day when instead of setting up an account with each organization you do business with, you set up a single account, which all the parties can consult. Such a setup could be useful for federal agencies for a number of reasons. For one, federal employees often need to access systems and data held by agencies other than their own. For another, e-government initiatives involve people who often hold no government-recognized credentials. How does the government authenticate their identities?

The General Services Administration's E-Authentication Identity Federation initiative can meet these needs, said David Temoshok, director of identity policy and management at GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy. The program is a central hub for facilitating interactions among different organizations. And one of the ways E-Authentication can offer this service is through an emerging Extensible Markup Language-based standard, called the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), which was first developed by OASIS and later adopted by the Liberty Alliance as the backbone for its efforts to offer tools for federated network identity...

Through the Liberty Alliance, GSA also maintains a list of SAML-based products that are interoperable. Like the common terminology, this streamlines the process of setting up an authenticating relationship with another party. In September [2007], GSA mandated that all products undergoing SAML interoperability testing be certified to be interoperable with Version 2.0 of SAML.

Read the complete article by Joab Jackson in Government Computer News.