The capability of
WS-Trust of expressing trust relationships between parties will
play a key role in the realization of an identity layer for the
Internet.
SAML: Token or Protocol?
You might have noticed that throughout the text the term SAML appears very,
very often.
As you read in the section ???SAML??? in Chapter 1, the SAML speci?¬?cation de?¬?nes
a protocol on its own. It has its own ways of dealing with token issuance, for
example; and it tries to solve problems such as the single sign-on, which live at
a different level of abstraction than the sheer WS-Security speci?¬?cation. How
does that play with all the ???technology-agnostic??? rhetoric we used in the sections
???WS-Security??? and ???WS-Trust???? The answer to that question is very simple.
Apart from the section ???SAML??? in Chapter 1, every time we mention SAML
throughout this book, we are not referring to the SAML speci?¬?cation in itself, but
to the SAML token pro?¬?le mentioned in the sidebar ???WS-Security Tokens and
Token Pro?¬?les.??? The SAML token format is extremely ?¬‚exible and proved to be
an ideal vessel for security-related information in many scenarios. Used in conjunction
with the WS-Security token mechanism and the rest of the WS-* family
of speci?¬?cations, it lends its expressive power without introducing dependencies
on any particular technology.
Pages:
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264