Guide to NameID Formats and Attributes Available from the UW IdP

This document describes the NameID formats and attributes that can be released by the UW Identity Provider (IdP) to  SAML relying parties (e.g. Shibboleth SPs).

Background

In addition to providing user authentication and single sign-on (SSO) for web applications, SAML provides the capability for an IdP to release additional user information to an SP at authentication time. The user information is presented as a nameID and assertion attributes. Attributes are useful for access control decisions and personalization within the SP application. When integrating an application with SAML, it is helpful to know which NameID formats and attributes are available, where they come from, and what they look like. This guide provides that information.

NameIDs

NameIDs are returned to an SP in the IdP’s authentication response. They are enclosed within the <Subject></Subject> block of XML.

AAdzZWNyZXQxHXqU1u2h16PsI7AMqO
9JoRQANqwu4Dpe1fvRrjMlYoL3v/kR
H9QHUX7SqOomf2MyZhIbSReBUBnIiA
JwN3nVfyKPxYs88/GZ74FKvA7xlpOs
cvMFmQPz3U9zyvxcotResE+dYICFLX
mZImZW1NZSS6LQWQ==

¹ All NameID formats the UW IdP releases have three parts: IDP entityID|SP entityID|value. For example, an eppnNameID might look like urn:mace:incommon:washington.edu|https://dept.uw.edu/shibboleth|netid@washington.edu. Only the last part is shown in the “Example Value” column.
² See ePPN description in table below.
³ See uwNetID description in table below.
⁴ See uwEduEmail description in table below.

Attributes

Attributes are returned to an SP in the IdP’s authentication response. They are enclosed within the <AttributeStatement></AttributeStatement> block of XML.

Some attributes provided by the UW IdP are defined by the eduPerson specification.

• You request release of attributes via the UW Service Provider Registry. See instructions for requesting attributes for more information.
• In the table below, “SP Registry Name” is how the attributes are labeled in the UW’s SP registry.  “FriendlyName” and “Name” are how the attributes are labeled in the SAML response from the IdP.
• The attribute “FriendlyName” from the IdP can be mapped to any Service Provider attribute “ID” by configuration in the attribute-map.xml file. The Service Provider attribute “ID” is what will be populated into web server environment variables. There is rarely a good reason to change the “ID” to anything different from the default “FriendlyName”.
• Multi-valued string attributes normally show up in the environment as a string of semi-colon separated values.
• Several attributes are sourced from the Person Directory Service (PDS). See the PDS Attribute Reference for more information.

Table 1. The information in this table is specific to personal UW NetIDs. For shared UW NetIDs, the IdP can only release UW NetID-based, uwRegID, and displayName attributes. A bolded SP Registry Name value highlights cases where the attribute name used in the SP Registry interface differs from the “FriendlyName” released by the IdP.

¹ attributePersistentID is the most common way to use the persistent id attribute. It replaces the SAML1 ePTID.  TargetedID and PersistentID vales are equivalent. PersistentID is constructed using the IdP entityID, the SP entityID,  and an opaque ID for the user.
² The entitlement_lib always generates a value of “urn:mace:dir:entitlement:common-lib-terms”
³ ePTID is a SAML 1 construct that has been replaced with PersistentID in SAML 2. You probably want nameIDPersistentID or attributePersistentID instead.
⁴ The IdP doesn’t normally release all groups to an SP. You will need to specify the particular group(s) or stem(s) that are of interest to your application.
⁵ Departmental affiliation based on an employee’s supervisory org in Workday.
⁶ Does not include student whitepages phone number data at this time.

Default Behavior