WS-Federation was developed by an industry consortium and was released in December 2006, with Microsoft being a key contributor. WS-Federation is also part of a larger framework, WS-Security, and builds on the work of WS-Trust from February 2005, defining the following two key principles:
- The protocol for requesting/receiving security tokens
- How trust should be brokered between parties using an Security Token Service (STS)
It also defines two profiles:
- Active Requestor Profile
- Passive Requestor Profile
WS-* Federation Suite consists of:
- WS-Trust
- WS-Federation
- WS-Policy
In the next section, we will describe the key elements of the WS-Federation specification.
