Federation
Federation describes scenarios in which no one group or organization manages all users and resources in a distributed application environment. Instead, administrators in diverse domains must manage local security policies that support mutually beneficial transactions among their respective spheres of operation.
The term federation derives from the Latin word for trust. In the world of distributed network services, the term refers to the need for trust agreements among decentralized security and policy domains.
Federation lets access-management functions span diverse organizations, business units, sites, platforms, products and applications. Federation requires that an organization trust each trading partner to authenticate its own users' identities. In a federated environment, a user can log on to his home domain and access resources transparently in external domains, such as those managed by customers or suppliers, subject to various policies defined by home and external administrators.
From Federation key to Web services, Network World, 04/29/02, which discusses federation in the context of the Security Assertions Markup Language.
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