Learn how federated identity management enables secure SSO, reduces password risks, and ensures compliance with NIST and SAML standards.
Federated identity management is the process of conveying identity and authentication information across administrative domains so users can access multiple applications with one digital identity.
In a federation, an identity provider (IdP) authenticates the user and issues an assertion that a relying party or service provider trusts. NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines formalized this model and defined Federation Assurance Levels (FAL) that focus on how assertions are constructed, protected, and validated.
Federation works by having an identity provider authenticate the user and send a signed assertion or token to a relying party, which uses it to grant access.
Under the hood, federation relies on web protocols that allow secure redirection between the application and the IdP. In a typical browser flow, the app redirects the user to the IdP for user authentication, the IdP verifies authentication factors, and then returns a standardized assertion or token containing identity claims.
The relying party validates the message’s signature, checks audience and expiration, maps attributes to local roles, and establishes a session. NIST’s SP 800-63C details roles like Credential Service Provider, IdP, and relying party, as well as the format and security properties that assertions must meet.
Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2) and OpenID Connect (OIDC) are the most widely deployed standards to carry identity across domains.
Organizations use federation to provide single sign-on (SSO) across SaaS, partner portals, and multi-application environments while centralizing authentication, policy enforcement, and audits.
Common scenarios:
Why this model helps:
Centralizing trust in an IdP cuts the number of credentials a user has to maintain and helps support consistent login policies. NIST also notes that a single Credential Service Provider can serve multiple relying parties, and that relying parties can accept more than one provider, which improves flexibility and scale.
SSO is a user experience where one login grants access to multiple apps, while federation is the trust framework and protocol layer that makes cross-domain SSO possible.
SSO can exist inside one enterprise directory, but federation extends SSO across different identity management systems run by different organizations, using standards like SAML and OIDC to carry identity from the IdP to many apps. Federation enables cross-domain SSO by establishing trust between identity providers and service providers.
In other words, SSO provides the experience and federation provides the trust and interoperability.
Federation reduces password sprawl, allows stronger sign-in at the IdP, and concentrates policy and audit in one place that many apps can honor.
Verizon’s 2025 DBIR highlights that roughly 88% of basic web application attacks involved stolen credentials, underscoring why consolidating authentication and strengthening authentication mechanisms at the IdP.
IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report found the average global breach cost reached $4.88 million, reinforcing the need to lower identity related risk by shrinking the credential footprint and improving centralized controls.
Federation introduces design and operational challenges, including trust establishment, metadata and certificate lifecycle, attribute mapping, and incident response across parties.
Establishing trust requires accurate metadata exchange, agreement on signing keys, encryption, and endpoint URLs. Rotating certificates without downtime takes process maturity. Attribute releases must be scoped using data minimization principles, and mapping attributes to roles needs careful governance. When incidents occur, multiple entities need clear playbooks for revocation and token invalidation. NIST and ENISA publications discuss aligning assurance, identity proofing, and governance practices to keep federations resilient.
Frontegg connects your application to enterprise identity providers using SAML or OIDC, so customers can bring their own IdP and use single sign-on across your product. Developers configure trust relationships and map identity attributes to roles, and Frontegg handles assertion and token validation while your app focuses on business logic.
Frontegg also gives non-engineering teams a clean administrative interface to manage SSO connections, rotate certificates, adjust MFA and role mapping, invite users, and review audit logs without filing developer tickets. The result is faster enterprise onboarding, fewer passwords for end users, and consistent sign-in and policy across environments.
No, any organization that runs multiple apps or integrates with partners can benefit from centralized sign-in and policy.
No, many modern stacks use OpenID Connect, and some environments support both for different apps.
Yes, NIST explicitly allows relying parties to use more than one credential service provider and to route users accordingly.
Use a risk assessment to set authenticator and federation assurance per relying party following NIST SP 800-63.
OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 flows are widely supported for native and mobile web apps that rely on an external IdP.
