RE: [security-services] Action A9: Error handling for SOAP profil e

[Irving Reid <Irving.Reid@baltimore.com>]

> From: Mishra, Prateek [mailto:pmishra@netegrity.com]
> >>If the receiving party understands the SAML assertion in the 
> >>SOAP header,
> >>but considers the assertion invalid, the receiving party 
> >>SHOULD return a
> >>SOAP message with a <Fault> element as the message body. 
> 
> What about the case where the SAML assertion is malformed or
> the receiving party cannot find extension schema etc. etc. It seems
> to me these are all reasonable grounds for returning a SAML error.
> 
> Basically, we are saying that we are providing an error for the
> case where the recipient has a problem in dealing with
> the assertion.
> 
> - prateek

This comes down to the discussion we had at F2F5 about the distinction
between the "SOAP processor" and the "SAML processor". If the receiver can't
parse the SOAP message because it's not valid XML (which may include schema
validation of the SAML-specific contents), it will most likely return a
standard SOAP <Fault> and the SAML processor will never be invoked.

Once the message gets through the SOAP processor and into the SAML
processor, we can talk about what sort of <Fault> we return.

I don't want us to constrain this too tightly, because different SOAP
infrastructures will likely provide different levels of support for schema
checking of message contents. That means some implementations may not have a
choice of returning the SAML-specific <Fault> for schema errors.

 - irving -


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