Accessing the production InCommon metadata using MDQ

The production InCommon Metadata Service is available at:

https://mdq.incommon.org

The service supports the MDQ protocol, which enables you to look up individual entity's metadata using its entity ID. To query, connect to the MDQ location with the following query string syntax:

https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/<$entityID>

where <$entityID> is the URL-encoded string of the entity ID you are searching. If you are searching for entity ID: https://acme.org/idp, the web query would be:

https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Facme.org%2Fidp

Fully federation ready software such as Shibboleth, has built in support for the MDQ protocol. They may have configuration options to help simplify implementation. See:

• Configure Shibboleth identity provider
• Configure Shibboleth service provider
• Prefetch an entity with Shibboleth

Retrieving metadata as aggregates

In addition to the querying feature, the Metadata Service produces two aggregates for bulk download. They can be used in place of the legacy InCommon aggregates should you not be able to take advantage of the MDQ protocol. The IdP-only aggregate, in particular, is useful for discovery services to retrieve/list IdPs in the federations in the discovery UI.

Configure your client with an aggregate below just like you would any hosted metadata, or how you had previously configured your client to use the legacy InCommon aggregates.

You will need to configure your clients to use new signing keys issued for the environment you wish to download metadata from. The aggregates available are:

Aggregates for the Production environment

Validate the signing key

Signing key: Metadata signing key for the production environment.