Provider Federation

The concept of federation as defined by the Liberty Alliance Project begins with the notion of a circle of trust. A circle of trust (referred to as an authentication domain in the Federation Manager Console) is a group of service providers (with at least one identity provider) who agree to join together to exchange user authentication information using Liberty-based technologies. Once a group of providers has been federated within a circle of trust, authentication accomplished by the identity provider in that circle is honored by all affiliated service providers. Thus, single sign-on can be enabled amongst all membered providers as well as identity federation among users.