Liberty's Advanced Client Technologies

Today, the Liberty Alliance announced the availability of the public draft release of the Advanced Client Technologies specification set.

This is personally pretty important for me because:

• it is closely related to the Identity Capable Platform research work that I'm doing at Intel (which we demonstrated at the RSA Security Conference in a joint proof-of-concept with British Telecom & Hewlett-Packard)
• I was the editor of each of the specifications (with lots of great contributions from several other Liberty members -- even Paul, if you can believe that)
• I was quoted in the press release :-)

The advanced client work is some pretty cool stuff where we are taking the next step in the evolution of powerful client capabilities including:

• Trusted Module - the IdP can extend itself onto the user's device in a trusted way so that the user's device can act as an extension of the IdP and assert the user's identity independently of an active session with the IdP (for privacy and/or connectivity reasons).
• Provisioning - functionality can be provisioned over-the-air (or over-the-wire) in a trusted fashion with full life cycle support. So Trusted Modules can be provisioned to devices already in the field.
• Service Hosting/Proxying - enabling connectivity challenged devices to be the primary host of services (such as my PDA being my "official" contact book service) while providing a more stable network visible proxy to provide access to that service's data through either local hosting or proxying request to the client service.

This draft release is being done much earlier in the spec evolution process than Liberty has typically done in past specification releases as part of our attempt to be much more open in our specifications development process. I hope that you take some time to look at the specs and provide feedback and/or input. I would recommend starting with the Advanced Client Technologies Overview before digging into the other specifications.

The only negative in all of this is, as Paul surmised, I was unable to figure out a way to insert my blog url (http://conorcahill.blogspot.com for those few that don't know) into either the specs or the press release. I'll have to see if I can get that error fixed in the next release.

Tags : identity / Liberty / Liberty Alliance / Advanced Client / Intel / HP / BT