Why Federation?
Traditional approaches to establishing trust between systems rely on bilateral agreements and manual metadata exchange. OpenID Federation introduces cryptographically verifiable trust chains — enabling dynamic, scalable trust without per-party configuration.
Entities join a federation once. Trust is derived from the chain, not from individual contracts between every pair of participants.
Every claim is signed. Trust Anchors publish constraints and metadata policies that are cryptographically enforced down the chain.
Works with OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and beyond. The federation layer is orthogonal to the protocol used for authentication or authorization.
What's Inside
Modular by design. Use only what you need — from core primitives to full OIDC registration flows, interactive learning, and visual exploration tools.
Packages (spec implementation)
Federation primitives — entity statements, trust chain resolution, metadata policy, and cryptographic verification.
Trust Anchor and Intermediate Authority operations — subordinate management, statement issuance, and policy enforcement.
Leaf Entity toolkit — Entity Configuration serving, authority discovery, and trust chain participation.
OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 federation flows — automatic and explicit client registration, Request Object validation.
Apps
Project homepage (this site).
An interactive course on OpenID Federation 1.0 — 15 lessons from first principles to federation topology design.
A visual tool for exploring live OpenID Federation deployments — inspect entity configurations, trace trust chains, and validate topology.
Tools
OpenID Federation Adoption
OpenID Federation is adopted in production by governments and academic networks worldwide.
AI & Machine Identity
As AI agents interact on behalf of users and organizations, verifiable trust becomes critical. OpenID Federation provides the infrastructure for agent-to-agent trust — machines can verify each other's identity and capabilities through the same cryptographic trust chains.