Generic framework for federated security enabled software systems

There is a remarkable growth in the number of organizations providing online services, some of which are free and some are not. Federated security is a concept that allows different organizations to share access to services based on their mutual trust and user's security credentials. Different federated security solutions (FSS) come with their specifications and guidelines for interacting software components in the software system. The boundary between 'federation' and the software component is often murky, and some FSS guidelines lack stringent requirements for implementing the federation concept. In this thesis we analyze the concept of federation, and how different software components interact with each other with respect to the federation. Based on the analysis we develop a generic framework that can be used to connect any existing FSS. The generic framework provides the features that are superset of features provided by any existing FSS.