Federation
Federation is a trust model that allows one system to rely on another system's identity assertions for authentication and access initiation.
- Synonym
- Identity Federation
Definition
Federation is the establishment of trust between identity domains so that one domain can authenticate a user and another domain can accept that authentication outcome to grant access. It is commonly used to avoid duplicate credentials, centralize identity control, and enable access across applications, organizations, or cloud services.
Why it matters
Federation enables secure cross-domain identity sharing and is foundational to modern SSO architectures.
The Ariovis perspective
Federation is an architecture choice, not a product checkbox. Ariovis assesses protocols, trust relationships, application constraints and migration paths before defining the target.
Related services
Common pitfalls
- A common pitfall is establishing federation trust without clear session management, token lifetime, and logout coordination.
Standards and protocols
- SAML 2.0
- OpenID Connect
- OAuth 2.0
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