The GFIPM Reference Federation has continually served the GFIPM community as the primary conformance and interoperability testbed for GFIPM integration and interoperability testing efforts since 2008. Recently the testbed was updated with a new feature to help reconcile typos and minor attribute configuration errors on GFIPM Identity Providers. This new capability analyzes the content of the raw SAML assertion delivered to the GFIPM Reference Service Provider and verifies each attribute name and attribute name format against the GFIPM Metadata Specification. In the past, when mistakes of this nature occurred it would only be detected by manual inspection of the SAML Assertion, as the reference service provider simply filtered out all invalid attributes. Now administrators will be able to quickly see all the data they transmitted and which attributes may contain errors.
NIEF Signing Certificate Transition Year
The calendar year of 2012 is a transition year for the NIEF Trust Fabric Signing Certificate. You can read the process we are following as we migrate to a new signing certificate in the NIEF Center Root Signing Certificate Transition Policy. The NIEF Trust Fabric will be signed with both certificates until February 2013, but as of August 2012 the longtime production URL at which the trust fabric was available for download will switch to being the signed with the new certificate. This specifically will impact any organizations using SAML software that automatically downloads, validates, and uses the NIEF Trust Fabric. Even if your organization is not using such software, I recommend being sure to update your local trust to the use the new NIEF Root Signing Certificate.