Hommel, W., Reiser, H. (2005):

Federated Identity Management in B2B Outsourcing

While the outsourcing of IT services is a promising and cost-effective solution for many aspects of today's information and communication infrastructures, it poses new management challenges in the area of authentication, autorization and accounting (AAA). Due to the demand of cross-organizational AAA, traditional Identity \& Access Management is presently developing into Federated Identity Management (FIM). However, existing FIM standardization efforts such as SAML still fail to bridge syntactic and semantic differences between cooperating organizations by requiring a common, federation-wide data schema. In this paper, we first demonstrate why this requirement is a severe obstacle for the efficient setup of identity federations by means of a real world B2B outsourcing scenario. We then specify an architecture, which extends SAML-enabled providers and solves the schema discrepancy issue based on XSLT transformations and a federation-wide schema correlation service. We also present its integration into the Shibboleth architecture, a popular open source FIM software.

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