Glossary
Affiliation
See scope (below)
Application
An application is where the user-facing bits are defined. In Keystone it’s also where you configure the OIDC bits, whilst for external apps such as Shibboleth it’s where you add the metadata.
Attribute
A piece of information about an object, usually a user, supplied by an identity provider.
Authentication & authorisation
Authentication is the checking of user credentials which in a federated context is done by the identity provider. Authorisation is whether or not they can access a thing which is decided by the service provider based on the user's scope and attributes.
Connection
The compliment to a Keystone application is the connection. This is where you select rules and which federations metadata to use.
Deep linking
Setting up your site such that a link can send the user directly to the signed-in version of a page.
Discovery
The way a user accessing an SP identifies to that SP which IdP they are from. Ideally a type-ahead search but sometimes just a list, this is sometimes referred to by the Shibboleth term 'WAYF' (Where Are You From). Our Wayfinder option is a good and simple way of adding this to your product.
EntityID
The identifier of an entity within metadata. An identity provider will have one of these but may have multiple scopes. These usually take the form of a secure URI - e.g:
https://idp.eduserv.org.uk/openathens
Identity Provider (IdP)
The organisation that issues identities to its users, e.g. a library.
Metadata
Information about entities. Each IdP or SP entity will have its own metadata that describe it in terms of signatures, certificates, sign-in addresses and what they support. There will also be a federation maintained central metadata which aggregates all the individual entities metadata.
This aggregated metadata is cached by entities for quick reference. The OpenAthens federation metadata has eTag support to help with this.
OpenAthens Keystone
A simpler way to interact with SAML federations around the world by leveraging OpenID Connect.
OpenAthens Redirector
When a resource supports both deep linking and wayfless access, our redirector can be used by identity providers as a simple way to form access links
OpenAthens SP
An old OpenAthens software, since replaced by Keystone. See OpenAthens SP end of life notice
Parent organisation and sub-organisation
OpenAthens IdPs can have a hierarchy of organisatsional units (OUs) when they need them. These will sometimes have their own scope (see below), and when they do they are shown separately in the stats reports.
SAML
Security Assertion Markup Language. The standard upon which most federations work.
Scope
In federations, scope is used as in ‘belonging to’ or ‘purview of’ an organisation. It is an identifier of an organisation or an organisational unit (OU) within a larger organisation. It is usually expressed as a domain and TLD owned by the organisation; an OU or sub-organisation’s scope would include a subdomain if it needed to be identified as different - e.g. if they have different subscription levels. In the OpenAthens federation, the sub-domain part is usually a number. E.g:
domain.com
3032162.domain.com
The scope is supplied as part of the scopedAffiliation attribute (see below)
scopedAffiliation
The friendly name for urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.9. A user's role, such as member, staff, student.
Service provider (SP)
The resource provider that authorises entry based on the scope and attributes of the user attempting access
Shibboleth
An open source SP software developed originally by Internet2 and supported by the community. Service Providers can use it in the OpenAthens federation if they like.
targetedID
The friendly name for urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.5923.1.1.1.10. It is a pseudonymous identifier for an individual user that is consistent every time the user visits an SP but different for each separate SP.
Transfer
The statistics we collect measure transfers. A transfer is when an IdP sends the end user back to the SP after authentication.
WAYFless URL
An access URL that includes the entityID of a user's IdP so that the user does not have to pass through discovery to identify their home organisation to a service provider.