Entity categories are used to indicate certifications and other properties of IdPs and SPs that are registered within the federation. These certifications may be self-asserted or formally assigned by the federation, but the criteria and certification processes are always made available for transparency.

InCommon Entity Categories

The following entity categories are available within InCommon:

1. REFEDS Research & Scholarship Entity Category - Used to streamline researchers' access to federated services that support their work by certifying those services as meeting specific criteria for purpose, security, and operational maturity.
2. REFEDS Security Incident Response Trust Framework for Federated Identity (SIRTFI) Category - Used to indicate compliance with REFEDS's framework for security incident response.
3. InCommon Bronze and Silver - Used to indicate compliance with NIST Assurance Levels 1 and 2, respectively.
4. Registered By InCommon Category - Indicates that the entity was registered by InCommon, as opposed to some other federation.
5. REFEDS Hide From Discovery Entity Category - Used to exclude an IdP from general-purpose discovery interfaces, e.g., because it is a test IdP. This category would not generally be used for production IdPs.
6. InCommon Research & Scholarship Support Category - Deprecated. See Research and Scholarship Category for more information.

For more information about entity categories, see General Information about Entity Categories.