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Preface
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In a digitalised world where both businesses and consumers want security in
their transactions the notion of identity has become more and more crucial.
Today one's identity on the network is fragmented across various identity
providers, employers, business services and other communities.  This
fragmentation leads to partial and often unsatisfying customers-to-business
relationships.

A Federated Network Identity allows new business opportunites and new economies
of scale. In a world of federated commerce a user's identity, preferences,
buying habits and history, are managed by the user himself and securely
exchanged with the organisations of the user's choosing.


The Liberty Alliance Project
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The Liberty Alliance Project was formed in September 2001 to develop
open standards for federated network identity management and
identity-based services. Its goals are to ensure interoperability,
support privacy, and promote adoption of its specifications, guidelines
and best practices. The Alliance is made up of more than 150 members,
representing a worldwide cross-section of organizations ranging from
educational institutions and government organizations, to service
providers and financial institutions, to technology vendors and wireless
providers.


The Lasso Project
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In July 2003 Entr'ouvert started to develop the "Carte de Vie Quotidienne"
project for the commune of Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy. This project quickly drove us
to take interest in cross-site authentication problems. We identified Liberty
Alliance specifications as the only ones potentially able to satisfy our need
for a strong authentication, coupled with private life respect. Lasso is a
library written in C which means it can be easily integrated within any kind of
web service whenever a strong authentication is required. Lasso has been the
first implementation of Liberty Alliance released under the GNU GPL license.


Acknowledgments
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Figures use drawings from GNOME Gorilla theme by Jakub 'jimmac' Steiner.