As we conduct more and more of our work and personal lives using information technology, we have to sign in to lots of different systems. That can mean many different sets of credentials which can be hard to manage. Federated identity is a way of streamlining this by linking an electronic identity and attributes across several identity management systems. This is related to single sign-on (SSO), which involves sharing authentication between systems -- such as signing onto other websites using your social network ID -- but federated identity goes much deeper. Background At its simplest federated identity means having a not… [Continue Reading]