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Federation
Definition
An association of organizations that use a common set of attributes, practices and policies to exchange information about their users and resources in order to enable collaborations and transactions.
A federation is an association of organizations that use a common set of attributes, practices and policies to exchange information about their users and resources in order to enable collaborations and transactions.
The goal of federated identity and federated authentication is to allow businesses and partners that trust each other in the real world to mirror that trust in their digital systems. Participants in federated systems may use different technologies with different security approaches and programming models, yet they can still integrate their businesses without substantial custom integration. Within a federation each organization continues to manage its own identities, but is capable of securely sharing and accepting identities and credentials from other organizations.
MIT Touchstone is a set of technologies and systems that enable federated authentication. MIT is part of the US higher-ed Shibbloleth federation named InCommon. MIT Touchstone also supports other technologies so that our local applications can also accept identities from OpenID identity providers.
