The document discusses authentication and authorization standards and patterns. It describes an intermediary pattern that provides a central login screen supporting multiple protocols like SAML, OpenID, and CAS. It also discusses challenges of wrapping one's mind around the model. Entity trust and multiple authentication principals are covered. Business to business authentication between business processes is mentioned along with design requirements. Attributes, assertions, and federated authorization are listed along with OAuth and SAML 2.0 standards.