Federated Trust or Federated Identity has come to mean many things. We follow the IBM™ conventions. Federated trust ensures that identities and authentication are available for the same user across different firms who have combined as a federation to permit the user to login once for any application that user is authorized within the federation. Authorization is a different phase of the policy.

Federated Trust or Federated Identity for Web Services are catagorised as:

• Community Trust Federation where business partners who have a trust relationship permit assertions with enhanced information to cross perimeters thereby allowing one party to become authenticated as a bona fide member of the community of users with roles and privileges. One party issues the assertion certificates.
• Multi-community model where two or more business partners have some relationship and a third party (a CA) will endorse the initiator among the Federation.

The Multi-community model has not taken hold as much, and has been our experience that most companies do not favor this model due to risk. Only consumer credit and financial firms like atm centers have had success in using third party authorities. Because most companies know their business partners directly our Federation model is based on Community Trust.

We support SAML and WS - Federation or Liberty assertions and follow the specifications.

The implementation of Federation reaches its apex in a secure appliance such as SingleTone™ and SingleKey™. The difference between our competition and us is that they sell a software solution that can be compromised. Our solution is appliance based. This gives us the following benefits.

• Each of our SingleKey/SingleTone Appliance is signed.
• Our directory Server, SingleTone, leverages authentication.
• Every appliance is aware of other appliances through a private key.
• The appliance is locked down, there is no known way for admins to change internals.
• The appliance generates assertions with client's public keys.

The result

• Built in Community Trust.
• No password exchanged and
• Authentication is done safely.

Bayshore Networks LLC is a known leader and expert in Federation and directory services.