Federation Options

Federation is used to solve the problem of cooperation across heterogeneous, autonomous environments. In the beginning, federation meant using the Liberty Alliance Project Identity Federation Framework (Liberty ID-FF). Since then, other federation specifications have been developed including the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and WS-Federation. OpenSSO Enterprise supports all of these specifications.

To get started, SAML v2 is strongly preferred for federation. WS-Federation is an alternative for integrating with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Liberty ID-FF and SAML v1.x are still supported but should only be used when SAML v2 is not an option as the SAML v2 specification supersedes both the Liberty ID-FF and SAML v1.x specifications. More information on these options can be found in the following sections:

• Using SAML

• Using the Liberty ID-FF

• Using WS-Federation

OpenSSO Enterprise has appropriated the terms from the Liberty ID-FF for all federation protocol implementations in the OpenSSO Enterprise console.