About the InCommon Metadata Service

As a prerequisite to trusted exchange of identity information between Identity Providers (IdPs) and Service Providers (SPs), those IdPs and SPs must be introduced to each other in a trusted manner to exchange information about organizational identities and designated contacts, certifications that have been achieved, technical information to enable interoperation, public keys to authenticate information exchanges, information to improve user experience, and the organization (e.g., InCommon) that performed the introduction.

InCommon metadata is the registry of those trusted introductions. In a very real sense, SAML metadata powers the Federation. Without metadata, trusted operations would grind to a halt.

As part of their compliance with the InCommon Participation Agreement, Participants provide accurate metadata for their IdPs and SPs. InCommon reviews that information for validity and publishes it as that registry. This process underlies and strengthens the security of the SAML protocol exchanges used throughout the federation.

Metadata Format

InCommon metadata conforms to the OASIS SAML V2.0 Metadata specification and is schema-valid against the OASIS SAML V2.0 Metadata schema, which is an XML Schema. A handful of extension schema published by OASIS are supported as well.

InCommon metadata is translated from XML to JSON on a daily basis. The latter are used to render the Federation Info Pages. See the wiki topic on Metadata-Driven Web Pages for more information.

More Information

• Metadata Distribution
• Metadata Registration and Publication
• Metadata Signing Process
• Metadata Consumption
• Managing Trust in Keys Used for Metadata - orig
• Metadata-Driven Web Pages
• Metadata page from the Shibboleth wiki

Downloading the InCommon metadata

Today all entity metadata distributed by InCommon is in the form of signed SAML metadata aggregates. A secure, offline metadata signing process aggregates metadata registered by InCommon Participants together with metadata imported from eduGAIN and pushes the signed metadata aggregates to a secure, publicly accessible metadata server.

Eventually the unwieldy metadata aggregates will give way to per-entity distribution methods such as those based on the Metadata Query Protocol.

On the horizon: Per-Entity Metadata Service

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eduGAIN and metadata around the world