Challenges to Supporting Federated Assurance

Federation is an identity management model in which various tasks associated with an identity transaction are distributed among the actors involved in the transaction. This model works from the premise that distributing tasks among the actors can achieve usability and privacy advantages for the user, as well as business efficiencies for businesses or applications. Typically, federated identity manifests itself as transferring some aspect of a user´s identity from one entity to another. Web single sign-on is an archetypical example of a federated transaction, in which a user authenticates to one Web site and can then access another with the same login.