Towards Interoperabilty in Identity Federation Systems

Digital services aimed at humans need to ensure user identity. Governments and institutions confront the identity problem when migrating their face to face services to the digital world, where no facial identification is plausible. On the other hand, users concerns regarding their privacy and security are a barrier to be overcome during the migration. Identity federations are envisioned to unify and simplify user and service management through trust relationships. Recent trends indicate that federations are limited by target audiences and scope and are isolated from each other. It is necessary to go one step further and work in interoperability mechanisms to develop the existing federations and improve user experience and service quality. This work reviews some of the most important identity federations, with the focus on well defined sectors such as research and education communities and governments, specifically Moonshot, eduGAIN, EUDAT, STORK and EIDAS. Based on their analyses, we consider interfederation scenarios between eduGAIN, STORK and eIDAS and propose interoperability mechanisms to reach interfederation solutions to extend the user’s scope of each o with the others and thus provide wider federation possibilities.