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In a digitalised world where both businesses and consumers want security in
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their transactions the notion of identity has become more and more crucial.
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Today one's identity on the network is fragmented across various identity
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providers, employers, business services and other communities. This
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fragmentation leads to partial and often unsatisfying customers-to-business
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A Federated Network Identity allows new business opportunites and new economies
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of scale. In a world of federated commerce a user's identity, preferences,
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buying habits and history, are managed by the user himself and securely
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exchanged with the organisations of the user's choosing.
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The Liberty Alliance Project
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============================
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The Liberty Alliance Project was formed in September 2001 to develop
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open standards for federated network identity management and
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identity-based services. Its goals are to ensure interoperability,
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support privacy, and promote adoption of its specifications, guidelines
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and best practices. The Alliance is made up of more than 150 members,
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representing a worldwide cross-section of organizations ranging from
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educational institutions and government organizations, to service
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providers and financial institutions, to technology vendors and wireless
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In July 2003 Entr'ouvert started to develop the "Carte de Vie Quotidienne"
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project for the commune of Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy. This project quickly drove us
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to take interest in cross-site authentication problems. We identified Liberty
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Alliance specifications as the only ones potentially able to satisfy our need
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for a strong authentication, coupled with private life respect. Lasso is a
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library written in C which means it can be easily integrated within any kind of
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web service whenever a strong authentication is required. Lasso has been the
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first implementation of Liberty Alliance released under the GNU GPL license.
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Figures use drawings from GNOME Gorilla theme by Jakub 'jimmac' Steiner.
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docs/lasso-book/preface.rst
