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:
- 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.
- REFEDS Security Incident Response Trust Framework for Federated Identity (SIRTFI) Category - Used to indicate compliance with REFEDS's framework for security incident response.
- InCommon Bronze and Silver - Used to indicate compliance with NIST Assurance Levels 1 and 2, respectively.
- Registered By InCommon Category - Indicates that the entity was registered by InCommon, as opposed to some other federation.
- 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.
- 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.