Scalable authentication

Federated identities are a capability that enables organizations to share trusted identities across the boundaries of their networks – with business partners, autonomous units, and remote offices. These technologies offer the prospect of scalable authentication needed for scalable trust management. However, there are continuing challenges in defining common authentication identities and, more important, in the forms of authorization that the inter-domain authentication will support. This problem has been partially addressed in some of the most common application areas such as the use of credit cards for electronic commerce on the Internet.