Liberty's new Strong Authentication Expert Group (SAEG) includes organizations such as American Express Co., the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Manpower Data Center, the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), Oracle Corp. and VeriSign Inc.

The new group has been created to speed the development of standards for strong authentication in a federated identity model, said Roger Sullivan, a Liberty board member who is also a vice president of business development at Oracle.

"Identity federation has begun to really establish some traction in the marketplace," Sullivan said. As a result, there's a growing need for a standard definition of strong authentication, what it means, when it should be used, what forms of authentications can be used and what business use cases exist for different types of strong authentication, he said.

"We are focused on the federation marketplace, but certainly the principles of what we are discussing can be applied" in other environments as well, he said.

Identity federation allows users to log in to applications and services across multiple domains and distributed, heterogeneous networks using a single set of identity and authentication information. Once logged in to one system, they do not need to log in again.