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<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Lasso & Liberty Alliance Overview</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.68.1"><link rel="start" href="index.html" title="Lasso Reference Manual"><link rel="up" href="index.html" title="Lasso Reference Manual"><link rel="prev" href="index.html" title="Lasso Reference Manual"><link rel="next" href="architecture.html" title="Lasso Architecture"><meta name="generator" content="GTK-Doc V1.3 (XML mode)"><link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css"><link rel="chapter" href="lasso.html" title="Lasso & Liberty Alliance Overview"><link rel="chapter" href="architecture.html" title="Lasso Architecture"><link rel="chapter" href="idff.html" title="Identity Federation Framework"><link rel="chapter" href="idwsf.html" title="Identity Web Services Framework"><link rel="chapter" href="xml.html" title="Schemas"><link rel="chapter" href="misc.html" title="Misc"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><table class="navigation" width="100%" summary="Navigation header" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2"><tr valign="middle"><td><a accesskey="p" href="index.html"><img src="left.png" width="24" height="24" border="0" alt="Prev"></a></td><td><a accesskey="h" href="index.html"><img src="home.png" width="24" height="24" border="0" alt="Home"></a></td><th width="100%" align="center">Lasso Reference Manual</th><td><a accesskey="n" href="architecture.html"><img src="right.png" width="24" height="24" border="0" alt="Next"></a></td></tr></table><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title"><a name="lasso"></a>Lasso & Liberty Alliance Overview</h2></div></div></div><p>

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<title>Lasso & Liberty Alliance Overview</title>

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<a name="lasso"></a>Lasso & Liberty Alliance Overview</h2></div></div></div>

<p>

Lasso is a library which provides all the necessary functions for sites to

implement <a href="http://www.projectliberty.org" target="_top">Liberty Alliance</a>

specifications. It defines processes for federated identities, single sign-on

and related protocols.

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Founded in 2001 by Sun in order to propose an alternative to the

Microsoft Passport project, the consortium Liberty Alliance aims to

promote an infrastructure of standards allowing the management of

federated identities between several services or systems.

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<p>

A federated identity (or network identity) of an individual or a legal entity

on Internet gather at the same time:

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Its identification (name, co-ordinates, preferences, history...);

</li><li>

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Its authentication (which guarantees the validity of an identity);

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</li>

<li>

Its authorisations (access rights to information, access rights to

services).

</li></ul></div><p>

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</li>

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<p>

Liberty standards aims to give more coherence to a network identity

which is scattered (numerous logins and passwords) today. This identity

becomes frequently delicate to manage, both for customers and businesses.

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The Liberty Alliance specifications define three types of actors:

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<li>

The user, person or entity who can acquire an identity;

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The identity provider which creates and manages the identity of

the users, and authenticates them to the service providers;

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</li>

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The service provider who provides services to the users once that

they have authenticated to an identity provider.

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</li>

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<p>

One calls circle of trust a grouping of identity providers and service

providers which agreed to share (to federate) the identity of their users.

</p><p>

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<p>

Contrary to most other implementations of Liberty Alliance, Lasso is not a

full-fedged system but a simple C library, with complete bindings for Java,

Perl, PHP and Python. The integration work should largely be facilitated.

An existing site should be able to integrate it in a few days of

development, without calling into question its architecture. Lasso is a

library written in C Language.

</p><p>

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<p>

Lasso is built on top of <a href="http://www.xmlsoft.org" target="_top">libxml2</a>,

<a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/" target="_top">XMLSec</a> and

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<a href="http://www.openssl.org" target="_top">OpenSSL</a> and is licensed under

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the <a href="http://lasso.entrouvert.org/license" target="_top">GNU General Public License</a>

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(with an <a href="http://lasso.entrouvert.org/license#openssl" target="_top">OpenSSL exception</a>).

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