This page collects proposals for future Incubator activities. Anyone may add a new idea by adding a new row to the table below.
Ideas don't need to be fully formed but the more scope we can get the easier it will be to assess whether the idea should be taken forward.
Anything in the Trust and Identity space is of interest, from improvements to current services to brand new ideas and technologies.
If you like an existing idea you can just add a +1 for endorsement. The more supporters a proposal gets the more likely it is to be implemented.
Example from a previous cycle
| Title | Proposer | Description | Supporter (+1) |
|---|---|---|---|
Self service - Signing in activity | Janusz Ulanowski (HEAnet CLG) | Service which could allow an user to check signing in activity on IdP service. That would allow an user to check the recent activity on his account in regards of authentication. Users could see the list if authentications containing datetime, ip and relying party etc. That would help them to spot suspicious activity. After discussion in the Incubator board, the proposal for the Incubator is inspired by the above proposal, but with a slight difference: Setting up a service as proposed originally is rather challenging as that service would have to learn about a lot of personal data. However, 'account activity', deployed as part of an IdP extension would actually improve privacy and GDPR compliance of e.g. SimpleSamlPHP and Shibboleth. Both SimpleSamlPHP and Shibboleth as well as also support the OIDC protocol. A 'profile page' should also allow an end user to manage and revoke OIDC access. | Janos Mohacsi: it would be advantageous to have a standardised log format to all popular IdPs. Then these logs should be dumped to ELK or similar server. The log collection server should provide a restricted access to the logs of a particular users. Mihály Héder: I think an Audit Log self-service is an interesting functionality. Account activity is available in many commercial accounts, certainly the googles and the microsofts of the world. We should keep up - also not only the IdP Audit Log but the SP is relevant. |
Proposals:
Proposal details:
| Title | Proposer | Description | Supporter (+1) |
|---|---|---|---|
Scalable testing for insecure SAML signature validation | Thijs Kinkhorst (SURF) | The SAML 2.0 protocol relies on XML signatures as the foundation of its security. A SAML assertion is signed with XMLDsig and the SP must properly validate this signature. If it does not, basically anyone in the world can trivially provide it with assertions thereby logging in as anyone, which also cannot be easily detected or even seen by the IdP. XMLDsig (and SAML) is notoriously complex and allows for many ways to create one or more signatures for any document. This makes that an implementation can easily fall victim to accepting not properly signed data - and even common implementations in our world like Shibboleth and SimpleSAMLphp have had issues here in the past. Besides these common products, which at least are periodically audited for such problems, a much larger risk is custom implementations that use different or even home grown libraries. Most of the times, the happy path is tested (does login work), but the unhappy path (do invalid assertions fail), not so much. Given the paramount importance of signature validation, we should have a way to test whether SPs check signatures correctly. Although this can be done manually already, what's lacking is a scalable way that can test e.g. eduGAIN-like size of service providers (repeatedly) and for a large proportion of that set, determine if signatures are processed correctly. This requires to devise tests to fire off at these SPs and heuristics to determine automatically whether the tests passed or failed.
| Peter Brand (ACOnet) |