Federated Identity

Federated Identity is an emerging paradigm for managing user authorizations within a network context, as opposed to a per-system context. Federated Identity typically uses encrypted "assertions" of a user's privilege that can be consumed by any relying party, and used to make access decisions. Assertions are typically formatted according to standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language or X509 Attribute Certificates. Advantages to this approach include reduced security administration costs and streamlined business to business collaborations.

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