WS-Federation: Passive Requestor Profile

Level: Advanced

Contributors: IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, VeriSign, RSA Security

08 Jul 2003

The WS-Federation specification defines an integrated model for federating identity, authentication and authorization across different trust realms and protocols. This specification defines how the WS-Federation model is applied to passive requestors such as Web browsers that support the HTTP protocol.

For the passive mechanisms to work seamlessly with WS-Federation, and provide a single or reduced sign-on, there needs to be a service that will verify that the claimed requestor is really the requestor. Initial verification MUST occur in a secure fashion, for example, using SSL/TLS or HTTP/S.

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Resources

• Web Services Federation Language defines mechanisms to allow different security realms to federate by allowing and brokering trust of identities, attributes, authentication between participating Web services.
  
  
• Federation in a Web services world describes the issues around federated identity management and a comprehensive solution based on the Web services model as outlined in the WS-Security roadmap.
  
  
• Web Services Federation Active Requestor Profile defines mechanisms for requesting, exchanging and issuing security tokens within the context of active requestors.
  
  
• Read "Security in a Web services World" for a proposed strategy for addressing security within a Web service environment (developerWorks, April 2002).
  

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