Novell has created an open source project called Bandit to unify the disparate identity systems in use in the enterprise today and provide a standardized approach to securing and managing identity across differing systems and resources.

Bandit code will be an overlay on an existing identity management system. Ultimately, the goal is to provide organizations with a consistent approach to enterprise identity management challenges such as secure, role-based access and regulatory compliance reporting.

The move will doubtless irritate some Novell critics who think it's leading too much with this identity stuff and should be focusing on Linux.

Bandit's identity services are supposed to work with existing industry standards such as WS-* and Liberty Federation, and open source projects like Eclipse Higgins.

Novell says it has contributed significant engineering resources and code to jumpstart the effort and intends to continue to support Bandit with substantial engineering resources and maintain the project while the Bandit community grows.

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

According to Burton Group VP Mike Neuenschwander, "The Bandit project is looking to address one of the toughest challenges in identity management today - provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity. The creation of identity services that abstract the complexity of identity systems and that are interoperable and freely available is a worthwhile goal and represents an important inflection point in the ongoing development of the identity management market."

(This story was originally published by Client Server News.)