The more real business and interaction with public authorities is performed in digital form, the more important the handling
of identities over open networks becomes. The rise in identity theft as a result of the misuse of global but unprotected identifiers
like credit card numbers is one strong indicator of this. Setting up individual passwords between a person and every organization
he or she interacts with also offers very limited security in practice. Federated identity management addresses this critical
issue. Classic proposals like Kerberos and PKIs never gained wide acceptance because of two problems: actual deployment to
end users and privacy. We describe modern approaches that solve these problems. The first approach is browser-based protocols,
where the user only needs a standard browser without special settings. We discuss the specific protocol types and security
challenges of this protocol class, as well as what level of privacy can and cannot be achieved within this class. The second
approach, private credentials, solves the problems that none of the prior solutions could solve, but requires the user to
install some local software. Private credentials allow the user to reveal only the minimum information necessary to conduct
transactions. In particular, it enables unlinkable transactions even for certified attributes. We sketch the cryptographic
solutions and describe how optional properties such as revocability can be achieved, in particular in the idemix system.