Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 4: Information Assurance & Cyber Defence
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4) Attribute processing – implementation considerations:
Two approaches are considered for utilization of SAML token claims in the authorization
process:
• A SAML token includes only a unique identifier of an entity (e.g. user,
service). In this case, utilizing the ID extracted from the token, the RP
local identity store has to be queried for other identity attributes required
at the authorization process,
• Apart from a unique identifier of an entity, additional claims are provided
in a SAML token, required to perform the authorization. The additional
attributes can be provided either by the IdP, or can be derived
from the identity store in the DMZ area (if the “NATO as an Alliance”
scenario is in a consideration), or from the local identity store of the RP
(like in the previous case).
The first option would be the recommended one. However, there might be
cases when the other option, requiring additional attributes in tokens, will be
more appropriate. This might be the case e.g. when the authorization component
in the RP domain is not able to query the identity store, or the identity store is not
available in RP’s domain.
H. Compliance
Federation trust relationships have to be verified in order to maintain the agreed
(in a federation) business scope and level of protection.
The compliance aspects should be considered separately in both NATO scenarios
(NATO Enterprise vs. Alliance) as the means to ensure the compliance will
differ for both scenarios.
Normally, for low-risk and some medium risk applications, self-assessment
and certification by a domain’s internal audit function may be sufficient.
For some medium-risk and all high-risk scenarios, a periodic external audit will
be necessary. In the “NATO as an Alliance” scenario, the federation agreement
should clearly specify the following:
• roles,
• responsibilities,
• procedures and standards,
• liabilities in contracts
I. Standards
The wide variety of federation use cases imply a variety of standards and
specifications that can be utilized. For the architecture proposed in this document,