The GRENA Identity Federation (GIF) assists cross-institutional services by providing federated authentication and authorization among participating organizations. Any Georgian education or research institution, also third parties wishing to provide services to the community can become member of GRENA Identity Federation.

The GIF members fall into two categories:

• Identity Provider (IdP) - is education or research institution authenticating their users and certifying their identities for the provision secure and trustworthy access to resources.

• Service Provider (SP) - is organization that provides service or resource via authorization. In a federated environment, Service Providers do not hold identity information about users but using authentication provided by the Identity Providers.

The GRENA Identity Federation plans to become part of eduGAIN (Education and Global Authentication Infrastructure), the GEANT inter-federation service that connects many research and education identity federations worldwide, simplifying access to content, services and resources for the global research and education community.

The main advantages of the digital identity federation are:

• Students, teachers and researchers have secure access to the services and resources of different member organizations by using existing single institutional account.

• Service providers have opportunity to offer their services to large number of users.

• Institutions do not have to invest in new resources that can be shared through the federation.