WS-Federation

WS-Federation (Web Services Federation) is an Identity Federation specification, developed by a group of companies: BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA Inc. (along with Layer 7 Technologies now a part of CA Inc.), IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and VeriSign. Part of the larger Web Services Security framework, WS-Federation defines mechanisms for allowing different security realms to broker information on identities, identity attributes and authentication.[1] WS-Federation focuses on federated identity and trusting authentication tokens across different realms, privileged password management is concerned with the security, control, and audit of high-risk account passwords within an IT environment.[2]