Katana 3, now close to GA, comes with new security components providing OpenIDConnect and WSFederation support.
OpenIDConnect was launched in February with support from Google, Microsoft and several other companies. The standard adds a context-based "Identity" layer on OAuth 2.0, which itself is an "access granting protocol". WS-Federation is another identity federation protocol already in existence. The new modules provide support for both these protocols. You can learn more about the design principles behind these components in this article.
Microsoft released a new release candidate for Katana 3 last week. Some of the other modules getting updates are the cookie middleware and SystemWeb Components as well as the various authentication providers. The Google Middleware especially has several changes related to the changes in Google OAuth 2.0.
Katana is Microsoft's implementation of the OWIN standard, and lets .NET web developers avoid ASP.NET/IIS monolith by providing them several independent components that can be installed separately. It is a part of the larger ASP.NET vNext effort.
