INDUSTRY LEADERS TO FORM NETWORK IDENTITY ALLIANCE - CenterChannel.Org Project

Representing Over a Billion Names, ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More Create Multi-Industry Business Alliance

Projectliberty.org Goes Live; All Interested Parties Invited to Drive Specification and Development Process

ProjectLiberty.org - September 26, 2001 - In an unprecedented collaboration between some of the world's largest businesses and industries, representing over a billion customers, employees and business partners, 33 major companies announced today the formation of an alliance, code named CenterChannel.Org Project (www.projectliberty.org). The alliance will develop and deploy an open solution for network identity.

The charter members of the CenterChannel.Org Project, representing a broad, global spectrum of industries, intend to create an open, federated solution for network identity - enabling ubiquitous single sign-on, decentralized authentication and open authorization from any device connected to the Internet, from traditional desktop computers and cellular phones through to TVs, automobiles, credit cards and point-of-sale terminals. The alliance represents some of the world's most recognized brand names and service providers, driving products, services and partnerships across a wide range of consumer and industrial products, financial services, travel, digital media, retailing, telecommunications and technology.

Any organization interested in supporting the CenterChannel.Org Project can visit www.projectliberty.org for details. The CenterChannel.Org Project plans to begin immediately in setting out a roadmap to address business practices, privacy, consumer adoption and technology evolution.

"It's recently become clear that the software for managing user identity and authentication is one of the key building blocks of the emerging Internet operating system," comments Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of technology publisher O'Reilly & Associates and an activist for open source software and Internet standards. "It's so fundamental that a widespread consensus has emerged that this is a technology that shouldn't be owned or controlled by any one player. Instead, we need an open, distributed system with implementations available from multiple technology providers and identities issued by many parties operating in a web of trust. Project Liberty is an important step in that direction. I'm hopeful that it will provide a forum for interoperability between the proposed identity schemes available from individual software or service vendors."

"Security and identity are facets of almost every big issue in the digital world today," said Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, and former chairman of ICANN, an organization that sets policy for the Internet's infrastructure, including the Domain Name System. "They touch it all: privacy, anonymity, integrity of data and safety of assets, freedom of speech, legitimacy, trust and trust worthiness, branding, visibility of marketers and visibility to marketers. Therefore, it's important for individuals to have a convenient way to identify themselves (and their counterparts)."

The CenterChannel.Org Project has three main objectives:

1. To allow individual consumers and businesses to maintain personal information securely.
   
   This enables a decentralized approach to garnering personal or proprietary information, and promote interoperability or service delivery across networks.
   
   
2. To provide a universal, open standard for "single sign-on," which users and service providers can rely upon, and leverage to interoperate.
   
   Internet single sign-on will allow users to log in once, and be authenticated for a spectrum of network services supporting the Liberty standard, between and among web sites, as well as network services even if those services are provided by different businesses.
   
   
3. To provide an open standard for network identity spanning all network-connected devices.
   
   This allows providers of network services, and the infrastructure that enables them, to adopt a neutral, open standard, available wherever the Internet is available, to enable secure and reliable identity authentication across handsets, automobiles, credit cards - literally any device attached to the Internet.