On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 3:32 PM, John Erling Blad <[email protected]> wrote:

> > So, since we're discussing SAML and OAuth and OpenID, and such, I
> > should mention this:
> >
> >    http://simplesamlphp.org/
> >
> > It supports SAML, OpenID, OAuth, it's extendable and it supports
> > multiple backends (LDAP, MySQL, etc). It is also localizable.
> >
> > - Ryan
>
> That one is interesting for the Norwegian Wikipedia community as it
> would make it possible to log into Wikipedia from the identity
> federation system used in Norwegian schools. That is we would be able
> to block individual students that are trolling instead of whole
> schools.
>

Good to know. :)


There's really two separate things that these systems can do.

The classic OAuth scenario is like this:

site A: Wikipedia
  user A
site B: Huggle

Site B initiates a special login on site A using a shared secret; on
success, site A passes back authentication tokens to site B which verify
that user A allowed site B access.

Site B then uses those tokens when it accesses site A, in place of a
username/password directly.


OpenID, SAML, etc seem to be more appropriate for this scenario:

site A: Wikipedia
site B: University
  user B

These systems allow user B to verify their identity to site A; one
possibility is to use this to associate a user A' with the remote user B,
letting you use the remote ID verification in place of a local password
authentication. (This is what our current OpenID extension does, basically.)


These are, IMO, totally separate use cases and I'm not sure they should be
treated the same.

-- brion
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