Moonshot is a single, unifying technology for extending the benefits of federated identity to a broad range of non-web services, including cloud infrastructures, high performance computing & grid infrastructures, and other commonly deployed services including mail, file store, remote access, and instant messaging.  It is a secure and flexible means by which people can use the credentials issued to them by their home organisation to authenticate to a wide variety of systems, services, and applications, and all in a manner that gives these users Single Sign On (SSO).

Moonshot builds on deployed, proven technology, including:

• Strong authentication as used by eduroam (EAP/RADIUS);
  
• Strong authorisation as used by many national federations (SAML); and  
• Strong service/application integration as used by many major applications (operating system security APIs).

Moonshot is an implementation of the IETF's Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web (abfab) Working Group's set of open standards.  It is being developed by Janet, the UK's National Research Education Network, in collaboration with a number of partners from around the world.

• Reduce the amount of usernames and passwords you have to remember.

• Single Sign On to all of the services you use.

• More secure authentication to the services that you care about, managed by your home organisation.

• Preserve your privacy when using services by not releasing personally identifiable information - unless you want to.

• Reduce the cost and effort of administration - no credentials to manage for all of your users.
• Secure and timely authentication - credentials are linked back to the user's home organisation so are up to date and revoked instantly. and because these credentials are used by that user for many things they will take good care of them.
• Flexible authorisation - manage who gets access to what and when in whichever way best meets your needs.