What is SAML?

Question

I saw an interesting blank page today titled "saml post profile intersite transit."

• What is SAML?
• What was it created for?
• What is it commonly used for?
• What was the page I mentioned above all about?
• What functions does it provide that it's rarely used for but are otherwise interesting?
• Is there something better or other technology that competes with it?

Answer 1

Here you go

Security Assertion Markup Language

Answer 2

I was part of the OASIS community (through my former employer) during the creation of SAML. Simply put, SAML is an XML-based format for sharing security credentials across domains. SAML was created to solve the problem of SSO between service providers in SOA.

We used SAML, including our own C# implementation, to provide the authorization/authentication scheme for a set of business services and infrastructure services used by several of our larger customers. We created a web services accelerator and service-oriented platform for using these services, and SAML drove the security.

That's oversimplifying a bit, of course.