1. Background

This is a proposal plan for a project to develop and establish a metadata registry based on the PEER User Stories and PEER Service Description. The PEER service and software draws from years of accmulated knowledge and is based on user-stories developed by representatives from WAYF.dk, MACE, InCommon, The UK Access Management Federation and SWAMID.

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PEER aims to be a lightweight solution for the registration of SAML Metadata. PEER approaches SAML metadata differently from the well known and understood access management federations. Most federations in operation now:

• Offer both technical trust and behavioural trust (through policy management);

• Provide both metadata registration and metadata publication services. 

PEER will provide only technical trust and metadata registration, and leaves the other considerations for consumers of the metadata to manage.

In order to ensure optimum use of federated access management, it is important that both ends of the security spectrum are examined. Whilst international efforts such as eduGain are examining this space from a policy driven perspective, PEER seeks to examine an approach where the registrar of the metadata does not involve itself in establishing policies for consumption.

The PEER service will provide the opportunity to examine the necessity of behavioural trust, challenge the current model of registration and publication as a central service for federations and review the points at which trust is established between end users and relying parties. This in turn will provide opportunities to improve the services offered by federations and provide economies of scale through a shared registration service for federations and support for more effective management of metadata.

2.  Goals

The goals of the PEER project isare:

• Develop To develop a software package based on the PEER user-stories.
• Deploy To deploy the PEER software in combination with other software and tools (cf below) as a service fulfilling the PEER service description.

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• To develop proposals for the long-term sustainability of PEER.

3.  Architecture and Scope

The following diagram illustrates a reference model of metadata distrubtion. In this model, the PEER service is an instance of a metadata registry. Where it is unambiguous the word metadata refers to SAML metadata. Note that not all instances of SAML metadata entities describe SAML protocol endpoints - the PEER service is meant to be agnostic wrt the uses of the SAML metadata it acts as a registry for. within the registry.

The following diagram illustrates the scope of the software developed for the PEER project and the role of a registrar in the federation model. The diagram is in the form of an ontology diagram. Read each ellipse-arrow-ellipse as a sentence, eg "A domain owner has a proof-of-possesson of SAML metadata" or "The MDX implementation obtains metadata from the metadata registry" and "The MDX implementation publishes signed metadata".

The PEER service (the grey box) will perform the following functions (the PEER service description provides a full list) :

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The components marked in green represent those software components which are expected to be part of the PEER software development project.

4. Governance

In accordance with agile methods best practices a product owner will be identified to act as a liason between the future users of the PEER software and service and the developers. The product owner will chair the project reference group and will be responsible for evolving and prioritizing the user-stories between each development sprint.

Additionally a project steering group will be responsible for oversight and budget control.

The project team is made up of the following people:

• Project Manager: Nicole Harris.
• Product Owner: Leif Johansson.
• Shibboleth Team: Chad La Joie and Ian Young. 
• Yaco Team: ??.

The steering group for the project is:

• Ken Klingenstein, Internet2.
• Licia Florio, TERENA.
• Lucy Lynch, ISOC (funder representative). 
• Victoriano Giralt, UMA.
• David Simonsen, WAYF.

5. Plan

The project consists of 3 phases:

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• SWAMID will operate an instance of PEER for internal use;
• NORDUnet will operate a public instance of PEER;
• The UK will run a public instance of PEER.

6. Budget

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Budget

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