Re: [security-services] Attributes in SAML 2.0 and Alignment withSPML 1.0

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <rlmorgan@washington.edu>]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Mishra, Prateek wrote:

> I have received the suggestion that our treatment of attributes in SAML
> 2.0 be somewhat aligned with their treatment in SPML 1.0. As best as I
> can figure out, SPML 1.0 uses the DSML 2.0 elements <dsml:DsmlAttr> and
> <dsml:AttributeDescriptionValue> to represent X.500 attribute names and
> values as XML elements.
>
> Could anyone comment on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach?

This may be moot, but as regards attribute naming, as far as I can tell
DSML makes the naive assumption that attributes can be well-named by their
LDAP string descriptors (eg, "cn").  This is really inadequate for reasons
I wrote about in my attribute-naming proposal document.

 - RL "Bob"