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.

Associated specifications
The following draft specifications are associated with WS-Security:
 * WS-SecureConversation
 * WS-Federation
 * WS-Authorization
 * WS-Policy
 * WS-Trust
 * WS-Privacy