Kantara Initiative eGov 2.0 Profile Draft

Version 2.0

Editors:

• TBD

• TBD

Abstract:
This document describes the eGovernment "Conformance (or Interoperability)" profile for SAML 2.0.

Filename:
Kantara_Initiative_eGov_2.0_Draft.doc

Notice:
This document has been prepared by Participants of Kantara Initiative. Permission is hereby granted to use the document solely for the purpose of implementing the Specification. No rights are granted to prepare derivative works of this Specification. Entities seeking permission to reproduce portions of this document for other uses must contact Kantara Initiative to determine whether an appropriate license for such use is available.
Implementation or use of certain elements of this document may require licenses under third party intellectual property rights, including without limitation, patent rights. The Participants of and any other contributors to the Specification are not and shall not be held responsible in any manner for identifying or failing to identify any or all such third party intellectual property rights. This Specification is provided "AS IS," and no Participant in Kantara Initiative makes any warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, non-infringement of third party intellectual property rights, and fitness for a particular purpose. Implementers of this Specification are advised to review Kantara Initiative's website (http://www.kantarainitiative.org/) for information concerning any Necessary Claims Disclosure Notices that have been received by the Kantara Initiative Board of Trustees.
Copyright: The content of this document is copyright of Kantara Initiative. © 2010 Kantara Initiative.

Contents

Introduction

• Overview of eGov Profile

• Document References

• Draft History

• Key Words

Conformance Requirements

• Web SSO

• IdP Discovery

• SP Authentication Request

• IdP Authentication Response

• Assertion

• Single Logout

• Security

Metadata

• General Metadata

• <SPSSODescriptor>

• <IDPSSODescriptor>

• <AttributeAuthorityDescriptor>

Considerations for Version 2

Introduction

Overview of eGov Profile

The Kantara Initiative eGov profile is a Kantara Initiative 2 part Profile.

Part 1 is entitled interoperability profile for implementations.  It defines SAML 2.0 conformance specification for SP and IdP applications operating in approved eGovernment federations and deployments. The eGov profile is based on the SAML 2.0 specifications created by the Security Services Technical Committee (SSTC) of OASIS. It constrains the base SAML 2.0 features, elements, attributes and other values required for approved eGovernment federations and deployments. Unless otherwise specified, SAML operations and features follow those found in the OASIS SAML 2.0 specifications.

PM  'Constrains the base features' makes this sound like an interop profile, but the sentence following argues not...

Part 2 is entitled Interoperability Profiles for deployers.  Idealistically, the long term goal is to converge towards one agreed deployment for government worldwide.  Realistically there may be several deployments along the path to that long term goal. These profiles are the range of constraints/rules/actions/processes 'rule set' that we deployers have agreed on.  They may consist of one or more specifications to guide product configuration, federation operations, and to test deployments against. 

This eGov profile does not reflect which aspects of SAML the individual governments must utilize in their respective federations. Thus, it is not a deployment level profile. Detailed information on deployment level detail can be found in the "Comparison and Analysis" document originally produced by Liberty Alliance SIG-eGov group.

In summary, this eGov profile therefore does reflects

(a) the SAML features that vendors [CW 10-01-20: and open source developers] must implement within their product offerings to satisfy SP and IdP functionality necessary to be conformant to this profile

[(b) CW 10-01-20: the confluence of the deployment operational criteria of the governments of the USA, Denmark, New Zealand ..and Canada?, Finland? that use products and/or features that have been accepted as "implementation" level criteria in (a) above]

Document References