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Understanding WS-Federation: Challenges and Progress in Interoperability

This document explores the WS-Federation OASIS standard 1.2 (May 2009), highlighting its operational modes, including "normal" and "passive" modes, and the federating access process. It details the collaboration efforts between Identity Providers (IdPs) and Service Providers (SPs), comparing WS-Federation to Shibboleth while emphasizing its flexibility. The challenges faced during the implementation, including issues with trust establishment, metadata discovery, and debugging, are discussed alongside insights and lessons learned for future progress in open-source implementations.

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Understanding WS-Federation: Challenges and Progress in Interoperability

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  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

  3. 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

  4. Basic Operation

  5. “Federation” – metadata discovery

  6. 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

  7. 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)

  8. 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

  9. 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

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

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

  12. Debugging • Inspecting over SSL sockets nearly impossible • Which is a feature  • Debug at client or server • Browser plugins – egTamperData for Moz

  13. 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

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