Federated Identity Management Solutions

Federated identity management allows users to access mul-tiple services based on a single authentication. This reduces the number of digital identities that users have to manage, and lowers the administrative costs of the organisations pro-viding the services. Several technologies and frameworks have been developed to carry out the necessary activities re-lated to identity federation, such as linking user accounts across services and enabling Single Sign-On. This paper covers some of the most important solutions currently avail-able, namely the Security Assertion Markup Language, the Liberty Alliance framework, Shibboleth and WS-Federation. It presents their overall architecture and provided features, and also discusses some of the deployment and usability as-pects related to the solutions