Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment of Federated Authentication Architectures: Securing SSO and MFA Workflows

Federated authentication architectures have become a central mechanism for providing scalable access to distributed applications through Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Their security advantage derives from centralized or delegated identity assurance, but federation also creates complex trust relationships among identity providers, service providers, authentication brokers, clients, and authorization components. Consequently, compromise of one critical component can propagate across multiple relying applications. This research presents a structured threat analysis and risk assessment approach for federated authentication architectures, focusing on SSO and MFA workflows. The methodology combines architectural decomposition, STRIDE-oriented threat identification, workflow-level attack analysis, trust-boundary assessment, likelihood-impact scoring, and control-oriented risk prioritization. Particular attention is given to credential theft, token manipulation, replay, session hijacking, identity-provider compromise, MFA bypass, assertion misuse, privilege escalation, repudiation, and availability attacks. The analytical model emphasizes that MFA does not independently eliminate federation risk because authentication assurance can be undermined at protocol, session, recovery, or trust-management layers. The study also incorporates methodological insights from the supplied literature concerning systematic evaluation, robustness, ensemble reasoning, reproducibility, and decomposition of complex systems. The resulting framework provides a practical basis for identifying high-risk authentication paths and strengthening identity federation through layered controls, continuous monitoring, least privilege, resilient session management, and risk-adaptive MFA.

Federated Authentication, Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication, STRIDE

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