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Encyclopedia > Federated identity

In information technology, federated identity has two general meanings: Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ...

  • The virtual reunion, or assembled identity, of a person's user information (or principal), stored across multiple distinct identity management systems. Data is joined together by use of the common token, usually the user name.
  • The process of a user's authentication across multiple IT systems or even organizations.

For example, a traveler could be a flight passenger as well as a hotel guest. If the airline and the hotel use a federated identity management system, this means that they have a contracted mutual trust in each other's authentication of the user. The traveler could identify him/herself once as a customer for booking the flight and this identity can be carried over to be used for the reservation of a hotel room. In computer science, identity management is the management of the identity life cycle of entities (subjects or objects) during which: (1a) the identity is established: a name (or number) is connected to the subject or object; (1b) the identity is re-established: a new or addtional name (or number) is... A JOIN clause in SQL combines records from two tables in a relational database and results in a new (temporary) table, also called a joined table. Structured Query Language (SQL:2003) specifies two types of joins: inner and outer. ... For other uses of the terms authentication, authentic and authenticity, see authenticity. ... For other uses of the terms authentication, authentic and authenticity, see authenticity. ...

Contents

Background

Centralized identity management solutions were created to help deal with user and data security where the user and the systems they accessed were within the same network -- or at least the same ‘domain of control’. Increasingly however, users are accessing external systems which are fundamentally outside of their domain of control, and external users are accessing internal systems. The increasingly common separation of user from the systems requiring access is an inevitable by-product of the decentralization brought about by the integration of the Internet into every aspect of both personal and business life. Evolving identity management challenges, and especially the challenges associated with cross-company, cross-domain issues, has given rise to a new approach of identity management, known now as ‘federated identity management.’


Identity Federation

Federated identity, or the ‘federation’ of identity, describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration. Identity federation comes in many flavors, including ‘user-controlled’ or ‘user-centric’ scenarios, as well as enterprise controlled or B2B scenarios. Business-to-business (B2B) describes relations of commercial partners, without serving the end consumer. ...


Federation is enabled through the use of open industry standards and/or openly published specifications, such that multiple parties can achieve interoperability for common use cases. Typical use-cases involve things such as cross-domain, web-based single sign-on, cross-domain user account provisioning, cross-domain entitlement management and cross-domain user attribute exchange. Single sign-on (SSO) is a specialized form of software authentication that enables a user to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple software systems. ...


Use of identity federation standards can reduce cost by eliminating the need to scale one-off or proprietary solutions. It can increase security and lower risk by enabling an organization to identify and authenticate a user once, and then use that identity information across multiple systems, including external partner websites. It can improve privacy compliance by allowing the user to control what information is shared, or by limiting the amount of information shared. And lastly, it can drastically improve the end-user experience by eliminating the need for new account registration through automatic ‘federated provisioning’ or the need to redundantly login through cross-domain single sign-on. Leading enterprises around the world have deployed identity federation to get closer with partners, improve customer service, accelerate execution of business partnerships and alliances, cut cost and complexity of integrating outsourced services, and free themselves from vendor lock-in. End-users and consumer focused web sites are now beginning to engage in identity federation through the adoption of OpenID, which is an open source specification for enabling federation use-cases. OpenID is a decentralized system to verify ones online identity. ...


The notion of identity federation is extremely broad, and also evolving. It could involve user-to-user, user-to-application as well as application-to-application use-case scenarios at both the browser tier as well as the web services or SOA (service-oriented architecture) tier. It can involve high-trust, high-security scenarios as well as low-trust, low security scenarios. It can involve user-centric use-cases, as well as enterprise-centric use-cases. The term ‘identity federation’ is by design, a generic term, and is not bound to any one specific protocol, technology, implementation or company. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that guides all aspects of creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle, as well as defining and provisioning the IT infrastructure that allows different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes regardless of the operating systems...


One thing that is consistent, however, is the fact that ‘federation’ does describe methods of identity portability which are achieved in an open, often standards-based manner – meaning anyone adhering to the open specification or standard can achieve the full spectrum of use-cases and interoperability.


Identity federation can be accomplished any number of ways, some of which involve the use of formal Internet standards, such as the OASIS SAML specification, and some of which may involve open source technologies and/or other openly published specifications, (e.g. Information Cards, OpenID, the Higgins trust framework or Novell’s Bandit project). The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards. ... Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an XML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, that is, between an identity provider (a producer of assertions) and a service provider (a consumer of assertions). ... Information Cards shown in an Identity Selector Information Cards (sometimes known as “InfoCards”) are visual representations of personal digital identities that people can use online. ... OpenID is a decentralized system to verify ones online identity. ... Higgins trust framework is a set of protocols and software applications that allow people to store their digital identities on their personal computers and share the stored information with companies and other parties in a controlled fashion. ... The Bandit project is an open source collection of loosely-coupled components to provide consistent identity services. ...


See also

Athens is an Access and Identity Management service that is supplied by Eduserv to provide single sign-on to protected resources combined with full user management capability. ... Digital identity refers to the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of peoples experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things. ... The Identity Metasystem is an interoperable architecture for digital identity that enables people to have and employ a collection of digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. ... Information Cards shown in an Identity Selector Information Cards (sometimes known as “InfoCards”) are visual representations of personal digital identities that people can use online. ... The Liberty Alliance, also known as Project Liberty, is a broad-based industry standards consortium developing suites of specifications defining federated identity management and web services communication protocols. ... Shibboleth is an Internet2 Middleware Initiative project that has created an architecture and open-source implementation for federated identity-based authentication and authorization infrastructure based on SAML. Federated identity allows for information about users in one security domain to be provided to other organizations in a common federation. ... The Windows Cardspace UI This subsystem is a part of . ... WS-Federation is an Identity Federation specification, developed by BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, Inc. ... Central Authentication Service (CAS) is a single sign-on protocol designed to allow untrusted web applications to authenticate users against a trusted central server. ... Windows Server 2003 Desktop The successor to Windows 2000 Server, Microsofts Windows Server 2003 (codename Whistler Server, also known as Windows NT 5. ...

References


  Results from FactBites:
 
SourceID | SAML, Liberty Alliance, WS-Federation | Federated Identity Management (578 words)
Federated identity infrastructure enables cross-boundary single sign-on, dynamic user provisioning and identity attribute sharing.
By providing for identity portability, identity federation affords end-users with increased simplicity and control over the movement of personal identity information while simultaneously enabling companies to extend their security perimeter to trusted partners.
New identity federation standards provide companies with the foundation for securing their outsourced business processes, hosted applications and web services while simultaneously addressing a host of other security, management and integration challenges.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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