EXTERNAL USER LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT FOR FEDERATED ENVIRONMENTS

The present invention provides a generic technique that externalizes the management of a user session, particularly in the context of a federated environment. The invention obviates any requirement to design and implement special software (or any requirement to modify a previously installed plug-in) to enable third party SSOp-aware applications to manage the lifecycle of a user session. In an illustrative embodiment, the user session lifecycle is managed externally through an external authentication interface (EAI) that has been extended to enable any POC (or SSOp-aware application) to interface to a federated identity provider component using a simple HTTP transport mechanism. In the inventive approach, HTTP request and response headers carry the information that is used by the POC to initiate and later destroy a user session, and such information is provided by a federated entity without requiring use of a special authentication API.