Shibboleth Developers

["David L. Wasley" <>]

Agreed.  Since it's not a scoped "handle" it is potentially dangerous 
and therefore should be treated as such in ARPs.

Thanks,
        David

-----
At 9:09 PM -0400 on 5/1/04, Scott Cantor wrote:

>  > I think the general case of a "portable handle," in spite of reduced
> >  privacy, has value as an extension to the basic model of
> >  "authenticate locally; authorize globally".  I think there may be a
> >  number of cases where the user may not be able to communicate with
> >  their local authN system but the target server could.
>
> It's important to note that if the target server trusts the credential and
> then happens to extract something out of it and sends it to some other
> service to map it to additional information, that's still a case of
> authenticating directly to the target, and not analagous to the SAML browser
> profile.
>
> >  The reason I referred to the cert subject name as a "handle" is to
> >  reinforce the notion that it serves approximately the same function
> >  as the Shib handle.  I think this may have some implications for the
> >  subject name content as well as for the AA API.
>
> It doesn't have any implications for the AA because it is in fact what you
> say, just a subject name. As is a "handle" in Shibboleth. The AA doesn't
> know or care anything about the subject name format, that's a completely
> pluggable decision. It knows nothing about handles today, for example, only
> the small bit of code that tells the AA what principal name corresponds to a
> handle knows anything about them.
>
> >  I also thought the x.509 object would be rather easier to deal with
> >  as opposed to almost any other form of portable credential.
>
> I don't disagree, just noting that if the numerous limitations of client
> software are such that it creates a problem for users, it's not clear
> there's much of an alternative.
>
> -- Scott