1. interfedoperation Interoperating WS-Federation Jens Jensen, RAL OGF31/Taipei

2. What it is WS-Federation: OASIS standard Version 1.2 (May 2009) Two modes –“normal” mode – SOAP –Passive mode – web So federating access rather than federation

4. Protocol Summary Bring together IdPs and SPs Similar to Shib, but looser federation More flexible in some ways –E.g. redirects to other IdPs –Metadata discovery –Establishing trust between trust domains

5. Basic Operation

7. “Federation” – metadata discovery

8. Objective – Plan A STS in Azure IdP running inside Azure –(could have been Pistoia customer) SP running at RAL –Needed OS SP for Apache –Using pingidentity for Apache

9. Result It didn’t work, went on to Plan B We made it better, but not working –Ran out of time/funding –Could pick up again later –Made squillions of lab notes (mostly paper)

10. Specifics Open Source client not maintained –Using old namespaces –Written for Apache 2.0 (should work for 2.2) –Needed some work to build (done partly outside the Apache build framework) –Not RFC2616 compliant (HTTP/1.1) Redirects failed –Expected different SAML content

11. Specifics The STS SAML not 100% matching WSFED1.2 SAML –But this was relatively easy to fix –SAML fairly stretchy Debugging redirects took time –Server said “error occurred” but not what – probably a security feature

12. Lessons Learned – no surprise Need both Java and C (or C++) implementations Interoperating, mature, maintained Test suite needs publishing –As part of OS code

13. Debugging Only possible with source code –Documented (and non-obfuscated) –Compilable Work orthogonal to hosting environment

14. Debugging Inspecting over SSL sockets nearly impossible –Which is a feature Debug at client or server –Browser plugins – eg TamperData for Moz

15. Whither then? Made good progress, could pick up again –Contribute back upstream? Other OS SPs available (untested) –GENESIS II, but in Java  Needs interest in community to thrive