Discovery hints from IdP:s delivering orgAffiliation

[martin-lindstrom]

A Discovery Service, or a Service Provider building its own discovery page, may want to display the different ways to login a bit differently in the case of orgAffiliation attribute release. When an eID issued to the members of an organization it may be better to actually display the different organizations to choose from that to select which IdP to use.

Example (ordinary discovery page):

Select which Identity Provider you want to use to login:
- Acme eID
- FooBar IdP
- ABC eID
- ...

This is probably the best solution in cases where the user has obtained his or her eID from the IdP, but in cases where the user obtains the eID from the organization, a better solution may be:

Select the organization that you belong to:
- The Tax Authority
- The Pensions Agency
- The University
- ...

In order to get this working an IdP need to announce which organizations it services (has issued eID:s to).

SAML V2.0 Metadata Extensions for Login and Discovery User Interface Version 1.0 specifies a set of helpful metadata elements that may be used.

The problem is that there is no perfect match. As I see it there are two choices:

• Add organization names under the <mdui:KeyWords> elements. This needs further explainations since the keywords are just strings.
• Add a new element under <mdui:DiscoHints>. This would require a new string type to be defined since the only defined sub-elements are: IPHint, DomainHint and GeolocationHint, and none of those is suitable to store an organization name.

[leifj]

KeyWords are pretty good for this since we're talking about indexing free text, not matching "correct" names.

[leifj]

Note that this discussion is covered extensively in the seamlessaccess working groups on discovery hinting. The issue we are facing is exactly the same one that is faced by big proxies in edugain.

[martin-lindstrom]

I think that we should add a text about this in the future "Technical Connection Requirements for Sweden Connect" document...