I was asked to present at the Department of Education's Software Developers Conference in early August and I received a lot of positive feedback.  You can find the presentation on my Presentations page.

The session was called "eAuthentication in Higher Education" and I talked about some of the current federations that are in production:

• Federal eAuthentication Federation
  
• Shibboleth and the InCommon Federation
• NCHELP's Meteor Network
• Electronic Authentication Partnership
  
• Many of the smaller federations throughout the country and in Europe

The basic purpose of the session was to educate the developers and hopefully show them that federations are not a radical idea anymore.  Their customers, the schools, are already implementing federations and they can integrate it into their software or else their competitors will.

What is Transitive Trust 

Let's start with a basic math lesson.  The transitive property of equality states:

If a = b and b = c then a = c.  

But let's carry that over to trusting people.

If Chris trusts Nick and Nick trusts Stephanie then Chris will (probably) trust Stephanie.

The transitive property isn't quite so absolute whenever humans enter the equation. 

What is a Federation

So we have the trust relationships but these only extend so far.  I may trust a friend of a friend but I wouldn't carry that to a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.  There are not indefinite levels of trust.

The boundaries of our trust make up our federation.  A federation is a group of organizations that have agreed to trust each other.

What  is eAuthentication

eAuthentication is one particular federation that is managed by the US federal government and specifically by GSA.  There are many other federations such as those that I listed above.  The one key difference with the eAuthentication federation is that the federal government has mandated that every agency will participate in eAuthenticaiton.  Every citizen who interacts with the government may potentially use the federation.