NIEF has officially deprecated support for the Trusted Identity Broker Organization (TIBO) membership role. A TIBO was a type of NIEF membership through which an agency could operate a Trusted Identity Broker (TIB) software service and thereby act as an identity broker for one or more other, non-NIEF-member agencies, enabling users from those agencies to gain access to resources offered by NIEF Service Provider Organizations (SPOs).

We previously supported the TIBO concept because it appeared to offer an appealing solution to “inter-federation” scenarios, in which users from one identity federation could reuse their identities across federation borders, within a different identity federation. But we discovered that the TIBO/TIB identity brokering model carries unacceptable consequences in terms of legal liability for NIEF and its member agencies. In lieu of the TIBO/TIB model, NIEF now supports a trustmark-based approach that enables many aspects of “inter-federation” connectivity without these legal limitations.