Metadata Query Protocol Specifications

This is the working area for the draft Metadata Query Protocol specifications. The main directory contains the editor's working copy of the drafts in their XML and plain text forms.

The specification is broken into two parts, one for the base protocol and one for a SAML-specific profile.

The current IETF process status for these documents can be viewed at their tracker pages:

• Base protocol: draft-young-md-query

• SAML profile: draft-young-md-query-saml

The editor's working copy may be fresher, but less stable, than the most recent formally submitted Internet Draft.

Terminology

Please don't use the term "MDX" to refer to this specification or the protocol specified by it. "MDX" as an acronym for MetaData eXchange refers to a more general concept of which the Metadata Query Protocol is just one component.

If you need to refer to this specification, "md-query" or even "MDQ" is more appropriate.

Implementations

The following software is believed to be compatible with the requester (client) role described in the current draft:

• Shibboleth Identity Provider, v3.0.0 or later:
  • configuration details
• Shibboleth Service Provider, v2.4.0 or later:
  • configuration details
• SimpleSAMLphp, v1.14.0 or later:
  • pull request
• Digital Identity Labs Metadata Query Tool:
  • mdqt: SAML MDQ client with caching and signature verification
  • mdqt-docker: SAML MDQ client with caching and signature verification, in a Docker container.

The following software is believed to be compatible with the responder (server) role described in the current draft:

• mdq-server is a Java implementation based on Spring Boot and the Shibboleth Metadata Aggregator:
  • Configuration examples can be found in the accompanying mdq-server-docker project.
• Any standard web server configured to serve appropriate static content.
• pyff.io

Contributing

If you wish to participate in the protocol development discussions you should join the mailing list. You can do this by means of this webform and then sending emails to mdx@lists.iay.org.uk.

If you'd like to contribute specific text to the document, you can submit a ticket to the project's issue tracker. GitHub pull requests are fine as well but are probably a bit of overkill here.

Please don't use the GitHub issue tracking system for substantive discussion; that should always be done on the mailing list. The issue tracker is used only to organize the outstanding substantive issues and to process minor editorial changes.

Background

This protocol work started out within the Shibboleth project. The current Shibboleth products consume large SAML metadata files that provide all the information necessary to communicate with peers. So, in some respects, SAML metadata files are like big /etc/hosts files.

This model has some obvious scalability problems as the number of peers increases. It also increases brittleness in the system because any erroneous metadata is visible to every consumer. The obvious solution then was to move to a more DNS-like model and this protocol is meant to be akin to the DNS query protocol, returning the information returned by a simple identifier lookup. So, some scoping requirements are:

• simple protocol — we don't want numerous options which end up behaving in strange ways when used together
• simple semantics — we don't need a sophisticated query language for the intended use cases
• metadata format agnostic — we started with SAML metadata but it shouldn't be the only format we support
• good net citizen — we need to work well with proxies, caching infrastructure, etc.

The chosen route has been to define the query protocol as a REST-like web service running over HTTP.

Building the Documents

The canonical source of each document is the .xml source file, which is required for submission to the IETF datatracker. The repository always includes that form plus .txt versions rendered from the XML.

I'm using the included Makefile to build the HTML and text forms of the document. This requires a locally installed copy of version 3.15.x of the xml2rfc tool. An online version of xml2rfc is also available.