What is Liberty Alliance?

The Liberty Alliance Project was founded in September, 2001 out of a broad global partnership, led by Sun Microsystems. Initial founding and charter members of the project included: ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, France Telecom, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, Novell, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Axalto, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign and Vodafone.

As we come across different websites and different online services,pieces of our identity are distributed to all the companies and corporations that we have interacted with.  In order to prevent our list of identities to continue growing, the Liberty Alliance project has been founded, by Suns Microsystems, so that consumers and businesses can conduct multiple online transactions through one account while securing their privacy and personal information.  A special feature in this project, called single authentication (single sign-on) allows users to authenticate themselves to an identity provider.  This information will then be authenticated to all the service providers who are members of Liberty Alliance.  The three main players, principal, identity provider, and service provider, that interact together to make this project happen is called the circle of trust.