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Users can mix and match their Liberty Alliance and Microsoft Passport identities, but only if the federated organizations with which they're doing business--the alliance one and the Passport one--share the same identity provider. The identify provider is the site that acts as the go-between for both federations of identity. It translates between the Liberty Alliance's SAML-based technique and Microsoft's Kerberos-based authentication (see "A Federation of Federations" ).

If the identity provider speaks both Liberty Alliance and Passport, a client or customer can log on to sites within a Liberty Alliance federation with his or her Passport ID, and vice versa.

Microsoft already offers its Passport services, and some Liberty Alliance products are available today as well. Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Oblix, Trustgenix and WaveSet Technologies all provide software based on the Liberty Alliance specs (see "Sites To See.").