The AAF project is working to develop infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications within and between research and higher education institutions to support world-class research. The idea is that each institution in the federation would trust the authentication credentials of other members’ users to provide improved, authorised acccess. The AAF model for federated access management uses Shibboleth and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

The Australian Access Federation has developed an animation to introduce the concept of federated access management.