WS-Federation is an Identity Federation

Federated identity

A federated identity in information technology is the means of linking a person's electronic identity and attributes, stored across multiple distinct identity management systems....

 specification, developed by BEA Systems

BEA Systems

BEA Systems, Inc. specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products known as "middleware", which connect software applications to databases and was acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008.- History :...

, BMC Software

BMC Software

BMC Software, Inc. is a multinational corporation specializing in Business Service Management software, with record annual revenue in fiscal 2009 of $1.87 billion...

, CA Inc.

CA Inc.

CA Technologies , formerly CA, Inc. and Computer Associates, Inc., is a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest independent software corporations in the world...

, IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, Novell

Novell

Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

, Ping Identity, and VeriSign

VeriSign

Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...

. Part of the larger Web Services Security

WS-Security

WS-Security is a flexible and feature-rich extension to SOAP to apply security to web services. It is a member of the WS-* family of web service specifications and was published by OASIS....

 framework, WS-Federation defines mechanisms for allowing disparate security realms to broker information on identities, identity attributes and authentication.

External links

• WS-Federation 1.1 specification
• Whitepaper: Understanding WS-Federation
• Whitepaper: Federation of Identities in a Web Services world
• IBM's WS-Federation page

Associated specifications

The following draft specifications are associated with WS-Security

WS-Security

WS-Security is a flexible and feature-rich extension to SOAP to apply security to web services. It is a member of the WS-* family of web service specifications and was published by OASIS....

:

• WS-SecureConversation
  WS-SecureConversation
  WS-SecureConversation is a Web Services specification, created by IBM and others, that works in conjunction with WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-Policy to allow the creation and sharing of security contexts...
  
  
• WS-Federation
• WS-Authorization
• WS-Policy
  WS-Policy
  WS-Policy is a specification that allows web services to use XML to advertise their policies and for web service consumers to specify their policy requirements.WS-Policy is a W3C recommendation as of September 2007....
  
  
• WS-Trust
  WS-Trust
  WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure...
  
  
• WS-Privacy

See also

• List of Web service specifications
• Web Services
• SAML
  SAML
  Security Assertion Markup Language is an XML-based open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, that is, between an identity provider and a service provider...
  
  
• XACML
  XACML
  XACML stands for eXtensible Access Control Markup Language. The standard defines a declarative access control policy language implemented in XML and a processing model describing how to evaluate authorization requests according to the rules defined in policies.As a published standard...
  
  
• Liberty Alliance
  Liberty Alliance
  The Liberty Alliance was formed in September 2001 by approximately 30 organizations to establish open standards, guidelines and best practices for identity management...
  
  
• OpenID
  OpenID
  OpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities...