Improving the scalability of identity federations through level of assurance management automation

Access to remote IT services through identity federations (IFs) has solid technical foundations such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). However, reliable delegated user authentication and authorization also pose organizational challenges regarding the quality management of user data. Level of Assurance (LoA) concepts have been adapted and applied to IFs, but their inhomogeneous proliferation bears the risk of aggravating instead of simplifying the manual work steps required for providing IT services for multiple or dynamically set up IFs. This paper presents a novel LoA management approach that has been designed for a high degree of automation and gives an outlook to its application based on the GÉANT-TrustBroker toolchain.