The SURFfederatie is the comprehensive identity federation for higher education in The Netherlands, connecting higher education institutes (as identity providers, IdPs) with public and commercial service providers (SPs). The SURFfederatie is an infrastructure with a well-developed hub-like architecture, including contracts that are signed by IdPs and SPs. It is seen as an example large scale federation approach for other sectors as well, and has earned the EEMA award of excellence in 2008. The main issue for the SURFfederatie is scalability, especially with respect to trust establishment. Therefore the federation is currently developing and testing future service service models beyond the traditional SP-IdP model, in particular: expand its domain to a wider range of (commercial) service providers; offer comprehensive identity-as-a-service for its customers; and introduce a user centric, rather than IdP-centric, federation model. Best practice experience of SURFfederatie and the results of investigating and trying out the alternative new service models will be presented.
