An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Niels van Dijk <niels.vandijk AT surfnet.nl>]

On 03/27/2014 12:04 PM, Ian Young wrote:
> 
> On 27 Mar 2014, at 10:46, Niels van Dijk <niels.vandijk AT surfnet.nl> wrote:
> 
>> Naive me was sort of hoping that combining CoC and attribute
>> requirements in metadata at some point would lead to something that
>> scales better as compared to what we have now.
> 
> I think it will, and I think things like the CoC will drive the presence of 
> RequestedAttribute a fair bit, but I don't expect any of this to happen 
> overnight.
> 
> As Leif and Alex have pointed out, though, RequestedAttribute is a pretty 
> broken mechanism in various ways. It really wasn't designed for what we're 
> trying to do with it. I don't see any perfect solution on the horizon 
> either; entity categories may help in many cases, but they are not a direct 
> replacement and they won't apply to all SPs. They *do* have the advantage 
> that rather than being the SP's shopping list, they can explicitly speak to 
> the *purpose* behind the provision of attributes.
> 
>> As joining eduGAIN as an
>> SP is a deliberate step anyway, I could imagine at that point requiring
>> better metadata from the SP.
> 
> We don't require it, but we do take the opportunity to push for 
> improvements.
> 
>> Should this be be something the eduGAIn community should consider?
> 
> You mean, should eduGAIN say that SPs MUST have this metadata? For what 
> it's worth, I wouldn't be in favour of that, as I am not in favour of 
> anything that raises a bar to participation in a service that is still in 
> its infancy in terms of adoption.
> 


But (perhaps putting it a bit bluntly): in our effort to lower the
amount of work for the SP have we perhaps taken away the opportunity to
fix the problem when it was still small (fix/upgrade a bit of config in
the SP) to a place where it is become big: multiple IdPs and federation
having to do the checking time and time again?

Cheers,
Niels