By Michael Hardy

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) today announced that its interoperability consortium has approved the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) as an OASIS open standard.

XACML, a variant of Extensible Markup Language, allows Web developers to enforce policies for information access over the Internet.

Its adoption as an OASIS standard means that agencies can implement it with the confidence that it will become widely used. As an open standard, no single vendor owns it and all developers can use it.

The standard is designed for use in authorizing which individuals should have access to information, said Carlisle Adams of Entrust Inc., co-chairman of the OASIS XACML Technical Committee, in a statement. Authorization procedures developed based on XACML can be applied to all products that support the standard, regardless of which vendor makes them, allowing for organizationwide uniform enforcement. Agencies are interested in such standards because the needs of homeland security, electronic government and other initiatives are pushing agencies to share information while keeping it secure, said Jim Flyzik, a consultant and the newly appointed chairman of the Information Technology Association of America's Homeland Security Task Group.

"It is something we've talked about for quite some time," he said. "There's always an interest in standardization, and XML is going to be a key technology for making systems interoperate."


Articles further details:   Federal Computer Week
Sun's Implementation:   sourceforge.net