A group of vendors led by Microsoft and IBM are expected Tuesday to unveil new specifications in their efforts to lead the development of standards for secure Web services and federated network identity.

At the Burton Group's Catalyst conference in San Francisco, IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems, RSA Security and VeriSign will debut the publication of three new specifications extending WS-Security and related technologies, and will publish them to their respective Web sites, said Karla Norsworthy, director of dynamic e-business technologies at IBM, Somers N.Y.

The new specifications are WS-Federation Language, which defines how to enable services with different security architectures on the back end to interoperate; Passive Requestor Profile, which describes how protocols defined in WS-Federation Language can be used by so-called passive users of Web services, such as those surfing Web sites or using Web-enabled devices; and Active Requestor Profile, which does the same thing as Passive Requestor Profile except it does it for SOAP-enabled applications and smart clients rather than passive users.

Together the new specifications broaden the scope of current proposed security standards developed by the group, such as WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS-Trust and WS-Secure Conversation, by enabling Web services to communicate despite having different security technologies on the back end, said Stephen Van Roekel, director of Web services at Microsoft, Redmond, Wash.