Glossary

Federated Trust*

In information technology, federated identity has two general meanings:

The virtual reunion, or assembled identity, of a person's user information (or principal), stored across multiple distinct identity management systems. Data is joined together by use of the common token, usually the user name.
The process of a user's authentication across multiple IT systems or even organizations.

For example, a traveler could be a flight passenger as well as a hotel guest. If the airline and the hotel use a federated identity management system, this means that they have a contracted mutual trust in each other's authentication of the user. The traveler could identify themselves once as a customer for booking the flight and this identity can be carried over to be used for the reservation of a hotel room.

* Source: Wikipedia®, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., August 10, 2007, via Wikipedia.org