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, HP 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.
Associated specifications
The following draft specifications are associated with WS-Security:
References
WS-Federation Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA