federated authentication

This document defines a mechanism for describing and signaling several aspects of a digital identity transaction and its participants. These aspects are used to determine the amount of trust to be placed in that transaction.

This document describes two SAML entity attributes: one that can be used to assign category membership semantics to an entity and another for use in claiming interoperation with or support for entities in such categories.

This document is a product of the working group process of the Research and Education FEDerations (REFEDS) group.

Over the last decade, a substantial amount of work has occurred in the space of federated access management. Most of this effort has focused on two use cases: network access and web-based access. However, the solutions to these use cases that have been proposed and deployed tend to have few building blocks in common.

This memo describes an architecture that makes use of extensions to the commonly used security mechanisms for both federated and non-federated access management, including the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS), the Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API), the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). The architecture addresses the problem of federated access management to primarily non-web-based services, in a manner that will scale to large numbers of Identity Providers, Relying Parties, and federations.

Federated identity is typically associated with web-based services at present, but there is growing interest in its application in non-web-based contexts. The goal of this memo is to document a selection of the wide variety of these contexts whose user experience could be improved through the use of technologies based on the Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web (ABFAB) architecture and specifications.

This document describes the use of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) with RADIUS in the context of the Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web (ABFAB) architecture. It defines two RADIUS attributes, a SAML binding, a SAML name identifier format, two SAML profiles, and two SAML confirmation methods. The RADIUS attributes permit encapsulation of SAML Assertions and protocol messages within RADIUS, allowing SAML entities to communicate using the binding. The two profiles describe the application of this binding for ABFAB authentication and assertion Query/Request, enabling a Relying Party to request authentication of, or assertions for, users or machines (clients). These clients may be named using a Network Access Identifier (NAI) name identifier format. Finally, the subject confirmation methods allow requests and queries to be issued for a previously authenticated user or machine without needing to explicitly identify them as the subject. The use of the artifacts defined in this document is not exclusive to ABFAB. They can be applied in any Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) scenario, such as network access control.

This specification provides a framework for the use of assertions with OAuth 2.0 in the form of a new client authentication mechanism and a new authorization grant type. Mechanisms are specified for transporting assertions during interactions with a token endpoint; general processing rules are also specified.

The intent of this specification is to provide a common framework for OAuth 2.0 to interwork with other identity systems using assertions and to provide alternative client authentication mechanisms.

Note that this specification only defines abstract message flows and processing rules. In order to be implementable, companion specifications are necessary to provide the corresponding concrete instantiations.

This specification defines the use of a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 Bearer Assertion as a means for requesting an OAuth 2.0 access token as well as for client authentication.

This document defines protocols, procedures, and conventions to be employed by peers implementing the Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API) when using the Extensible Authentication Protocol mechanism. Through the GS2 family of mechanisms defined in RFC 5801, these protocols also define how Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) applications use the Extensible Authentication Protocol.

The naming extensions to the Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface (GSS-API) provide a mechanism for applications to discover authorization and personalization information associated with GSS-API names. The Extensible Authentication Protocol GSS-API mechanism allows an Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) peer to provide authorization attributes alongside an authentication response. It also supplies mechanisms to process Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) messages provided in the AAA response. This document describes how to use the Naming Extensions API to access that information.

This document updates the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) applicability statement from RFC 3748 to reflect recent usage of the EAP protocol in the Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web (ABFAB) architecture.

The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) has found its usage on the Internet for Web Single Sign-On. The Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) and the Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API) are application frameworks to generalize authentication. This memo specifies a SASL mechanism and a GSS-API mechanism for SAML 2.0 that allows the integration of existing SAML Identity Providers with applications using SASL and GSS-API. [STANDARDS-TRACK]