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

[Alan Lewis <alan.lewis AT geant.org>]

Hello Peter,

Thanks for the feedback.
Comments below.

Best regards

Alan

Alan Lewis
Trust and Identity Services Product Manager

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-----Original Message-----
From: edugain-discuss-request AT lists.geant.org 
<edugain-discuss-request AT lists.geant.org> On Behalf Of Peter Schober
Sent: 15 April 2021 13:29
To: edugain-discuss AT lists.geant.org
Subject: Re: [eduGAIN-discuss] Problems and issues with SAML SPs in 
federations and eduGAIN

Btw, would this have anything to do with the 
https://access-check.edugain.org/ IDP in eduGAIN?
>> No, this is a separate activity although clearly here is some 
>> complementarity.

* Alan Lewis <alan.lewis AT geant.org> [2021-04-15 12:40]:
> To make any service as useful as possible it would be very helpful to 
> understand as many situations as possible where the SAML flow with an 
> SP fails.

A currently "popular" issue is the one of supported encryption algorithms in 
light of finally moving away from known-bad algos (such as AES-CBC) and 
towards better replacements (such as AES-GCM).

So testing with "AES-GCM" encryption enforced by the IDP would be 
interesting, I think, and could possibly be used to motivate the SP to add 
support for that, or (at the very least) to have the SP's metadata amended 
with (only) AES-CBC (if that's still missing) to clearly signal its broken 
nature.

>> The idea of motivating SPs to follow a particular behaviour is one that 
>> has some up. The concept of the 'goodness' of an SP has been >> raised, 
>> but this leads various problems around subjectivity and compulsion versus 
>> guidance. Nevertheless, it is something to >> >> >> consider and the 
>> example of encryption algorithm 'best practice' falls into this category I 
>> think.

But of course I'd also like to know this for the many more SPs only available 
in my local federation, so we probably would have to do something about that 
ourselfs (or expose such an IDP also to local federations and vice versa have 
it also load non-eduGAIN metadata feeds).

>> The Test IdP exercise is not focused specifically on eduGAIN, although 
>> this is clearly and aspect. Given that federation policies differ, >> 
>> developing a Test IdP service that was applicable in a homogeneous form 
>> sounds impractical, but perhaps some degree of                >> 
>> configurability could assist here from the perspective of the Test IdP 
>> admin.

-peter

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