Bell Labs, part of Lucent, has announced new network security software for privacy-protecting user authentication over computer networks. The new approach was presented today at the Usenix conference being held in San Francisco.
In contrast to some commercially available approaches where a company or third party is in control of user information, this approach puts the user in control of their personal information. Furthermore, it is an open platform that could authenticate a user with any website without requiring a website to adopt any single sign-on standard.
A document describing the details is available here.