Liberty Alliance Project

As with all kinds of technology today, there is competition. Microsoft, a leading force in the computer industry, created a program called Passport. Passport originated the notion of a single sign-on for multiple applications. The problem that Microsoft encountered with Passport was the hesitance many organizations and users felt in helping Microsoft to monopolize the computer industry any more than it already has. Furthermore, Microsoft's Passport, although innovative and ideal in theory, fails to recognize that there are already many authentication mechanisms. These solution owners are unlikely to go through the work of removing their own mechanisms in order to replace them with Microsoft's. In order for Passport to be successful, it must support the systems that are already in use. In theory, Passport would be extremely useful to the technology world. In practice, a federated system is necessary. This is the main thing that gives the Liberty Alliance Project an advantage over Microsoft's Passport.
Microsoft recently announced that it would be releasing an updated federated version of Passport. This version of Passport uses Kerberos, a trustworthy, established and widely used solution that has been used for distributing authentication tasks for the past ten years. …