This is a working document, major changes can be expected at any time.

Introduction

This document describes operational procedures implemented to support eduGAIN SAML services. It is required by the eduGAIN SAML Profile document [eduGAIN-Profile] and in addition to the Metadata Aggregation Practice Statement must be seen as complementary to eduGAIN SAML Profile.

eduGAIN services

Under the term services listed are utilities as perceived by external users. The internal organisation of services, flow of information and dependencies are not relevant in this view, but are described in sections further down.

Core Services

NameAccess locationDescriptionManaged by
MDShttps://mds.edugain.orgeduGAIN Metadata Distribution Service (MDS) is the central component of the eduGAIN service as a whole. For the  detailed description and procedures used in the eduGAIN metadata aggregate distributed by MDS see [eduGAIN-meta]. The eduGAIN metadata aggregate is produced on a separate, secured host (mds-feed) and it is copied to the distribution hosts and served form there by the http server. The file is updated hourly.OT
The technical sitehttps://technical.edugain.orgThe technical site is directed primarily at the federation level thechnical personel. It provides information about eduGAIN members, details about their participation. The technical site is also the distribution point of documentation and the home for several core and supplementary services.OT
Validatorhttps://validator.edugain.orgThe eduGAIN validator is a service designed for validating metadata adherence to standards and eduGAIN requirements. The software has been created primarily as a component for the eduGAIN metadata aggregation and the details of validation rules are given im [eduGAIN-meta]. The same software enriched by a GUI is used as a tool for manual validation of metadata and serves as a support tool for federation operators.OT
eduGAIN status informationhttps://technical.edugain.org/statusThis status page provides a view of the eduGAIN database in the part relevant to membership information and the current status of metadata aggregation. The page also displays short summary information about numbers of entities in eduGAIN. The interface provides links to scans of the eduGAIN declaration documents signed by federations, direct links to metadata validation, links to contacts, metadata sources etc.OT
Entities database GUIhttp://technical.edugain.org/entiesThis service is an interface to the part of the eduGAIN database which stores information about entities themselves. The interface has many filtering mechanisms and also allows for CSV download for further processing in a spreadsheet.OT
eduGAIN database APIhttps://technical.edugain.org/apiThe API provides access to most of information stored in the database. In particular, the API may be used by the federations to monitor the eduGAIN aggregation process. Other uses are statistics of various sorts or even download of membership maps.OT

Supplementary services

NameAccess locationDescriptionManaged by
ECCShttps://technical.edugain.org/eccs/eduGAIN Connectivity Check Service is a monitoring service for IdPs listed in eduGAIN, testing if they are actually ready for eduGAIN, i.e. if they consume eduGAIN metadataOT
isFederated Checkhttps://technical.edugain.org/isFederatedCheck/This tool searches all known academic identity federations for matching organisations and then displays the results.OT
CoCo monitorhttp://monitor.edugain.org/coco/Monitoring service testing for REFEDS Code of Conduct complianceSRCE
Technical testing platformhttp://technical-test.edugain.orgThis host serves as a playground for software development done by the operational team. All extensions are applied, tested and presented at this platform and then transferred to production using the git mechanismOT
WIKI
The WIKI is maintained as a part of the GEANT WIKI space. The content is provided by many members of the community. WIKI serves as technical documentation, formal documentation (meeting minutes, documentation of operational procedures) and various guides on joining and making most of eduGAINGEANT core
Support


Operational Team tasks

The team

As defined in [eduGAIN-CONST] the Operational Team (OT) is responsible for:

At the moment the OT also acts as the operator of the SAML technology profile.

Management of core eduGAIN services

Management or supervision of supplementary eduGAIN services

Supervision of eduGAIN joining process

The task of chairing the eduGAIN SG lies within the Operational Team. The SG chair supervises the joining process of new members, sets up consultations, handles voting, keeps the documentation of the process. As a part of the joining process federations are required to provide contact and technical information including sensitive factors such as public keys used for signature verification.

eduGAIN operational model and availability of services

eduGAIN core function is the metadata exchange point. Federations supply their own metadata and download aggregated metadata to supplement their own and redistribute them within their federation members. Federations are strongly discouraged from pointing any of their members directly to the eduGAIN MDS. Within this operational model even a relatively long (several hours) downtime of the MDS does not cause any disruption that could be noticed by individual identity or service providers.

While every care is taken that all eduGAIN services function reliably, the selected operational model allows that services updates and modifications can be done at a short-term notice allowing for a small risk of a downtime required to restore the system snapshot.

Operational Team procedures

Registration and modification of SAML profile related federation information

information typesecurity level
federation SAML policy URL1

registration practice statement URL

1

federation SAML metadata aggregate access URL

3

federation metadata signing key

4
registrationAuthority attribute value3

Security levels
security leveldescription
Sspecial - delegating representatives requires contact with the federation management
1informational, not requiring special vetting
2important contact information (while not currently used it may be introduced in the future)
3information of eduGAIN operational relevance, requires special care
4crucial for eduGAIN trust, requires utmost care

Introduction of new requirements for federation metadata feeds

Metadata requirements have direct operational impact. As described in the  [eduGAIN-meta] document, a violation of the requirements results in rejection of a federation feed. The requirements as understood in this documents are the rejection rules implemented in the eduGAIN metadata validator and automatically applied in the aggregation process.

As a principle requirements for federation feeds must be based on either general standards to which eduGAIN SAML profile adheres or on the eduGAIN SAML profile. In the case of standards, the experience shows that certain violations are only discovered when reported by participating federations - not all such violations are reported by standard schema validation tools, ot in fact not all are just schema errors. Whenever a new problem is reported, the OT makes an assessement whether it inf fact violates a required standard and if so then:

Every rule is documented in the [eduGAIN-meta] .

When raising an error, the validator points to the specific rule in  [eduGAIN-meta].

Arising problems which cause actual interoperability issues need to be handles immediately, as described in the matadata aggregation related procedures section below.

Introduction of new best current practices for federation metadata feeds

Additions to metadata best current practices need to be decided by the eduGAIN SG. Each such good practice needs to needs to be implemented as an eduGAIN validator warning by the eduGAIN OT. Each good practice rule needs to be implemented in [eduGAIN-BCP].

Metadata aggregation related procedures

The technical details of the aggregation process are described in  [eduGAIN-meta]. Here we only present the operational implementation of this process.

Aggregation, signing and publishing

The aggregation, signing and publishing of the eduGAIN metadata aggregate is done on an hourly basis.

All information about the system status, federation metadata channel information, federation public keys etc. is kept in the eduGAIN database and taken from there as required within the aggregation process.

Handling of aggregation alerts

As described in [eduGAIN-meta], under certain conditions aggregation alerts are raised. The current practice is that these alerts are sent as e-mails to the eduGAIN OT. Since alerts are relatively rare and federation metadata feeds can be cached for at least 4 days, the eduGAIN OT makes its own decision on how to react to a particular alert. Usually before sending a notification to a federation, the OT waits until the next aggregation run to make sure that the situation has not been rectified by the federation.

If the OT decides that a notification needs to be sent to the federation, the official contact address registered be the given federation is used. If one of the following conditions is met:

then the OT sends additional notifications to the federation delegate and the deputy using their e-mail addresses registered by the given federation.

If it becomes likely that a given federation may not be able to react in time and that its cached metadata feed may expire, the eduGAIN OT sends a warning to the eduGAIN SG mailing list.

It must be realised that that the case of all entities supplied by a large federation being deleted form eduGAIN has heavy consequences - other participating federations will naturally have to drop these entities. When the federation metadata feed becomes available again, other federations may be forced into running emergency regeneration of their metadata, service providers may observe limited breaks in their service. Therefore the eduGAIN OT is making all possible effort to avoid such situations. If the eduGAIN OT realises a very special situation it is allowed to temporarily stop aggregation in order to avoid the deletion of of the federation but it MUST immediately notify the eduGAIN SG that such measures have been taken.

One example of such a special situation may be a real case of an introduction of a valid but a very short-lived metadata file followed by a metadata error causing a aggregation reject. That situation, leaving no time for normal procedures to take place, was caused by a configuration error on the federation side and was rectified in a short time while the eduGAIN aggregation was suspended.

System maintenance

System updates

Backups

Disaster recovery

In the case of an unexpected problem resulting from metadtata aggregation (which may result from an unusual error on a federation side or some software bug in one of the aggregation process steps) the eduGAIN OT has access to hourly copies reaching 24 hours back and to several years of daily copies .

Restoration of snapshots or full virtual machines is possible (and has been performed several times not as disaster recovery but in order to get access to some old files for statistics reasons).

Technical details

eduGAIN database description

The eduGAIN database is central to all eduGAIN core services. The database stores:

The database is placed on a host separated from the external network, accessible only trough a limited numbers of secure hosts. Database access is realised via dedicated user accounts with access right crafted to minimize the possibility of unauthorized changes.

The database is managed mostly via a web interface secured with access passwords. Modification of data on security levels S, 1, 2 can be done without any additional protection. Management of data with security level 3 is protected with on-time passwords mailed to an external mail account of the managing administrator. Management of data with security level 4 requires direct access to the database host. 

For security reasons singing keys can be present only for federations which have been approved to be a member of the eduGAIN SAML Profile.

eduGAIN Metadata Distribution Service (MDS) 

eduGAIN Metadata Distribution Service (MDS) is the central component of the eduGAIN service as a whole. For the  detailed description and procedures used in the eduGAIN metadata aggregate distributed by MDS see [eduGAIN-meta] and theAggregation, signing and publishing subsection within this document. The eduGAIN metadata aggregate is produced on a separate, secured host (mds-feed). Metadata signing is also peformed on mfs-feed currently with a key file located on the host istself.

In order to minimise risks of exposing a high permissions account on the mds host the resulting aggreagate file is transferred from mds-feed to the mds host using a dedicated low premissions account. The aggregate is then moved to the final place on the mds host in a process innitiated within the mds host.

Organisation and management of services

Main access host - technical, validator, mds
DNS names

www.edugian.org, technical.edugain.org; validator.edugain.org; mds.edugain.org

All these are CNAMEs for massonia.man.poznan.pl

Function

eduGAIN database - edugain-db

Functionstore all data for services directly managed by the eduGAIN OT
The aggregation host - mds-feed
Functionacquire and validate federation metadata feeds, create, sign and publish the  eduGAIN metadata aggregate.

Security considerations

The security of the eduGAIN SAML services is essentially the security of the eduGAIN aggregate. This in turn depends on:

  1. validation of federation metadata input data - their originality and integrity - this depends on the safety of federation certificates (stored in the database) and the safety of the signature verification process itself
  2. aggregation process - it is crucial that the resulting aggregate contains exactly the data provided by participating federations (after modifications described in the [eduGAIN-meta])
  3. aggregation signature - the eduGAIN signing key and the signing process are the key factors here.

In order to maintain the high security standards the following operational procedures are in place, 

  1. The edugain-db and mds-feed hosts are located in a secured private network and can be accessed only form a single host in the PSNC network.
  2. The access to this single host is only available over SSH and only from a limited list of IP addresses.
  3. The federation signing keys can only be stored in the edugain-db with a process that needs to be run directly on the db host. This requires that the OT copy the key to the database host and run the process manually. The key is added to the database only when the decision to actually admint the federation metadata to eduGAIN has been taken. This is an additional security procedure guarding against a mistake in assigning the level of participation for a federation.
  4. The eduGAIN signing key is stored on the mds-feed host, where the whole process of aggregation and signing is run hourly. This host cannot be reached form the external network. The resulting signed aggregate is then moved th the distribution host as described in the Metadata aggregation related procedures section.