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National federations act both as Intermediates as well as Trust Anchors at the same time. Some Leaf entities may choose to only use the local, national federation as their trust context, in which case the national federation acts as the Trust Anchor. Others may want to make use of eduGAIN for cross-national transactions, in which case eduGAIN will be a Trust Anchor as well. The national federations offer a list of all the Leafs and Intermediates they have registered via the subordinates endpoint. This endpoint may also be used for discovery purposes.

Each National Federation provides a resolver to help their own subordinates to resolve trust chains. A national federation may provide one or more Trust Mark issuers, either for their own Trust Marks, or for Trust Marks owned by other parties like e.g. REFEDs or eduGAIN. One mandatory Trust Mark Issuer which must be present in the TA entity configuration is the eduGAIN Trust Mark issuer.

To register at a national federation, an out of band mechanism is used. Once registration is complete the national federation issues a national federation membership Trust Mark to the entity. Once the Trust Mark is part of the leafs entity configuration the national federation can automatically load and validate the Leaf into the subordinate registration. Diagram 1 provides an overview of this flow.

Diagram 1: Leaf registration at NREN federation (source: https://gitlab.software.geant.org/edugain/oidfed-docs/-/commit/53373c7f3282089b74d1cce496e49e241fb86fdc)

An API was developed in support of the above registration flow, which was implemented in to the [Gabriels TA]

eduGAIN Interfederation

The eduGAIN interfederation has a Trust Anchor and it registersregisters the national federations as Intermediates. eduGAIN interfederation has no Leafs. The TA developed as part of the testbed by Roland Hedberg will be used and operated by the eduGAIN Pilot team. Registration of participating Intermediates is manual.

eduGAIN may operate at least one and possibly more Trust Mark issuers

To allow Leaf entities to partof national federation Intermediates to participate in eduGAIN, these request the eduGAIN Trust Mark from the eduGAIN Trust Mark issuer. To validate compliance, the eduGAIN Trust Mark issuer will validate the presence and validity of the national federation membership Trust Mark.

eduGAIN Components

1. We assume 1 eduGAIn and 5 national feds

   - TA -> Roland testbed -  We setup the intermedats manually
   - Intermediate - Gabriels codebase includign the registration API
   - TM issuers
   - TMs
       - eduGAIN - Only national intermediates
       - National Fed Level Trustmark - Discovery, easier to resolve as compared to trust chain
       - REFEDs SirtFi - must be on national level.
       - VO membership - Independent TM
   - RPs -> Go implementation
   - OPs?
       - SSP (Marko) - Would a proxy also work with the SP side in a SAML fed?
       - Shib OP
       - Rolands OP
       - Can we proxy based on existng SAML IdPs? yes via SSP or SaToSa. - Ask Roland for readyness
       
   You may bring your own, but you are on your own, we will not support

   Do we also inject existing fed members (based on SAML metadata ) into the national federations?
   - Yes but in a different setup

   - Resolver: Most important for RPs as this will simplify RP life.

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