Centralized Discovery Service V3

This pages speaks about the Centralized Discovery Service. In our world view this is the fallback DS which Federations need to offer for non Javascript users, and to SPs that cannot, or are unwilling, to offer an Embedded Discovery Service.

The Shibboleth project is comitted to continuing to support the EDS.

Introduction

The currently shipping CDS is getting very old and cumbersome and currently requires several libraries which are end of life.

It is the developers' aim to end of life (stop supporting) V2 as soon as possible (ideally end of year 2015).

There are currently active discussions as to whether we will offer anything in replacement or point customers at any of the other discovery implementations that have become available.

If we are to develop a CDS then we need to start reasonably soon, and with that in mind below is some collated documentation (part requirements document, part top level design document, part project plan).

Requirements

The CDS MUST

Handle both the Discovery Protocol and the Shibboleth IdP Initiated SSO (WAYF) protocol
Be deployable in in ways which do not require the use of JavaScript in the browser
Be trivially clusterable (no serverstate)

The CDS SHOULD

Be easily customizable for other “skins” (the touch point will be integration with the UK CDS)

The CDS need not offer the following (which are available to CDS V2)

Offer any configuration compatibility to V2 of the CDS
Offset WAYF and DS protocols on the same end point
Any concept of Federation. Metadata is Just a bunch of data.

Technical Considerations

We want

To leverage the Shibboleth EDS
To leverage OpenSAML3 and (if possible) code for Shibboleth IdP V3 (for instance Metadata ProviderParsers?), ReloadingServices

Technology:

Spring MVC
Spring Beans
OpenSAML and the implementations of org.opensaml.saml.metadata.resolver.BatchMetadatResolver
(probably) The IdP impplemerntation of net.shibboleth.idp.saml.metadata.impl.ReloadingRelyingPartyMetadataProvider (and all the supporting infrastructure)
A pair of protocol bridges to allow WAYF to be handles by the common DS code (possibly using local profile of the DS protocol to encapsulate the WAYF parameters)
Velocity Template to render the putative IdP List
Design document for the protocol bridges
Design notes for the CriteriaSets used to generate the data
Learn Spring MVC
Design items list above
Extra Design items resulting from MVC code learn.

Centralized Discovery Service V3

Introduction

Requirements

Technical Considerations

Design Items

Work Items