Interoperability between Heterogeneous Federation Architectures: Illustration with SAML and WS-Federation

Mikaël Ates (1) , Christophe Gravier (1) , Jérémy Lardon (1) , Jacques Fayolle (1) , B. Sauviac (1)

1 DIOM - Dispositifs et Instrumentation en Optoélectronique et micro-ondes

Digital identity management intra and inter information systems, and, service oriented architectures, are the roots of identity federation. This kind of security architectures aims at enabling information system interoperability. Existing architectures, however, do not consider interoperability of heterogeneous federation architectures, which rely on different federation protocols.In this paper, we try to initiate an in-depth reflection on this issue, through the comparison of two main federation architecture specifications: SAML and WS-Federation. We firstly propose an overall outline of identity federation. We furthermore address the issue of interoperability for federation architectures using a different federation protocol. Afterwards, we compare SAML and WS-Federation. Eventually, we define the ways of convergence, and therefore, of interoperability.

Keywords: Identity Federation; Interoperability; SAML; WS-Federation; Architecture

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]; Computer Science [cs]; Web

Mikaël Ates, Christophe Gravier, Jérémy Lardon, Jacques Fayolle, B. Sauviac. Interoperability between Heterogeneous Federation Architectures: Illustration with SAML and WS-Federation. Third International IEEE Conference on Signal-Image Technologies and Internet-Based System (SITIS 07), Dec 2007, Shangai, China. pp.1063-1070, ⟨10.1109/SITIS.2007.148⟩. ⟨ujm-00345878⟩