Novell announced the Bandit project yesterday. Bandit open-sources key identity management technologies and creates projects for extending them. From the press release:

The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent experience of digital identity and includes several common identity services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance:

• The Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA) provides interoperable authentication that enables application and enterprise single sign-on with a secure vault for user and system credentials.
• The Common Identity service is an implementation of the Higgins framework for representing digital identity.
• The Role Engine service can be integrated into any application to consistently calculate role information and unify authorization across systems.
• The Audit Record Framework service provides an open auditing and compliance API and receives audit records from Bandit's open identity services and other applications to provide common identity and event information to verify security and compliance.

Novell already incorporates some of Bandit's open identity services within its SUSE Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit's identity services in future releases of other products.

From Novell Enables Rapid Adoption of Identity Management by Open Sourcing Key Technologies: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Referenced Tue Jun 13 2006 10:37:21 GMT-0600 (MDT)

The press release also contains key quotes from Paul Trevithick, technology lead for the Higgins project at the Eclipse Foundation, George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board, Bob Lord, Red Hat senior director engineering, Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity founder and CEO, and Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access for Microsoft. These quotes were important to demonstrate that there's an identity community trying to solve these problems in concert and avoid the vendor-sports circus that surrounded the Higgins announcement.