Publications

Presentations, papers, and other publications produced by SAFIRE and its staff.

How to perform a SAML trace

When asking for support, you may be asked to share a SAML trace to assist the support team in understanding your problem. This document gives step-by-step instructions on how to create one.

SAML 101 - An intro to SAML for sysadmin

This document intends to be a quick primer on SAML for those who want to get on with the rest of their todo list.

SAML seems big and scary, because it has a lot of decisions and moving parts. But the reality is that many of these decisions have already been made for you, and you don’t need to know about the moving parts to make it work for you. Thus this primer attempts to distill out the most important bits in a way that’s easy to skim.

Using a Smartcard-based HSM for SAFIRE

This post documents SAFIRE’s experiments with, and ultimate deployment of, a smartcard-based HSM for SAML metadata signing in the hope that we can help other emerging federations along the way.