SAML Conformance Sub-Group Report

1
SAML Conformance Sub-Group Report
Krishna Sankar / Bob Griffin
Face-to-face meeting April 18, 2001
2
Charter

• Provide sanity check to the specification
  process
• Can we implement what we specify?
• Will it achieve the goals of the initiative?
• Provide the required OASIS conformance guidelines
  for the standard
• Establish the criteria that define an
  implementation's conformance to SAML standard
• Facilitate the implementations
• Provide (coordinate?) a conformance suite against
  which the implementations can be checked
• Does an implementation satisfy the spirit of the
  spec?
• Will it interoperate?
• Work with other standards groups for
  interoperability and usage

3
What does conformance mean?

• Is it binary or do we need to have multiple
  levels ?
• Suggestion Binary Compliance either SAML
  compliant or not
• Simplest approach?
• What is conformance?
• Compliance to structure specifications?
• Compliance to bindings specification?
• choreography of use cases?

4
Implementations

• Once the specification is fairly stable (version
  0.75?), start working with potential implementers
• We need at least one test harness to verify
  compliance
• Identify OASIS requirements related to
  implementation

5
Plan of Action

• Continue reviewing specification to add
  conformance issues, notes, guidelines, etc.
• Develop conformance section for the specification
• Leverage refer to work done by conformance
  groups in for other standards (ebXML?)
• Start working with implementers when the
  specification is stable
• But start early so we can get the implementations
  as early as possible