SAML - How to process a request?

Question

Hello. I'm very very newbie at SAML... My question is simple: Upon SAML request what IdPs usually do?

I guess they first parse the XML... and then? Can anybody describe me the steps? I mean the common steps, that every IdP has to do at least.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The wikipedia article on this actually contains a lot of the information you need:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAML_2.0

Look at the example SAML 2.0 Auth Request and Response plus the list of steps involved. The simplest method is the "SP POST Request IdP POST Response" so start with that. It's not the only option for deploying SAML 2.0, there's others also described there as well. Hope that helps.