Trust Engines

Trust Engines check that a particular entity's credential is valid and that the entity is acting in accordance with a given role as defined by some SAML 2 Metadata. For example, a trust engine can verify that a service provider, attempting to perform an authentication request, is in fact the service provider it claims to be and that it is interacting with the !IdP in the appropriate !IdP SSO role. Thus a Trust Engine provides both an authentication and authorization mechanism.

Using Trust Engines

Trust Engines must implement the org.opensaml.security.TrustEngine interface which provides two methods described below. Particular implementations, some of which are described in the next section, may require some information at construction time, but once you have constructed an instance, the usage will be as described here.

Verifying Entity Credentials

The method validate(!EntityCredential, !RoleDescriptor) is used to validate an entity's credential against a given role for a given entity. For example, if a SAML-enabled client is speaking to an identity provider over HTTPS it may present a client certificate as its credential to the !IdP. In order to verify that the client is trusted to operate in a particular capacity, the !IdP could create an org.opensaml.security.X509EntityCredential with the client's information and pass in the role that the client SHOULD be acting as. If the method returns true, the client's credentials have been authenticated and it is acting in an appropriate role and thus the !IdP may trust it and process the request.

Verifying Message Signatures

The method validate(!SignableSAMLObject, !RoleDescriptor) is used to validate the digital signature on a message and assure that the client that sent the message is acting appropriately (as described above).