Service Categories (or Entity Categories) help managing the secure release of the right attributes to only appropriate Service Providers – within the eduID.at federation and beyond. As such the use of Service Categories within local policies is highly recommended as basis for scalableattribute release policies/decisions. The ultimate responsibility for the release of any personal data to third parties rests with the institution releasing the data, though.
See also Attribute release, in our Shibboleth IDP 2.4 documentation.
Service Categories for Attribute Release
Inspired by prior work by RENATER the international Identity Federations community (lead by InCommon, REFEDS and GEANT/eduGAIN) has started to create Service Categories (technically called "Entity Categories", since they apply to SAML "entities") in order to ease the management of release of personal data ("attributes") to services: It has long been apparent that manually writing and maintaining attribute release rules based on individual services does not scale sufficiently, esp. taking into account that e-research today requires international collaboration and does not stop at national or "federation" borders. Dealing with individual services on a case-by-case basis creates too much work for institutions and their staff (if done "right"), often resulting in students or scholars not being able to access needed (inter-)federated resources because the institiutional SAML Identity Provider did not release any data to the accessed service.
Below you'll find copy&paste-able attribute release filter rules for the Shibboleth Identity Provider v2.4 for each of the most important Service Categories. Be sure to carefully read and understand each category's description/definition before use.
People managing technical infrastructure (such as servers and Shibboleth configuration files) should not be ultimately responsible for decisions resulting in the (non-)release of personal data to third parties. Contact ACOnet with any and all questions relating to Service Categories!
REFEDS Research & Scholarship
Membership in category REFEDS R&S is reserved to services "that support research and scholarship interaction, collaboration or management as an essential component". This globally applicable category takes a risk-based approach to enabling access to high-benefit/low-risk services, releasing only low-risk personal data. Basically only the minimum personal data required for scientific collaboration and attribution of a person's work is released (name, email address and an identifer).
GEANT EU/EEA Data Protection Code of Conduct
As part of the Code of Conduct Cookbook you'll find the Recipe for a Home Organisation, giving complete instructions on the necessary steps for deployment. This Service Category only applies when both the Service Provider and the Identity Provider are based in the EU/EEA (i.e., it does not help with services outside the EU/EEA) and uses the EU data protection directive as common frame for disparate implementations thereof throughout the EU. As such it is mostly meant as a reminder and a reassurance to both service owners and home organizations that the services covered are already subject to (national implementations of) EU data protection law.
As this Category definition does not specify an attribute bundle (i.e., it doesn't reference specific attributes which should be released) the list of attributes to release is basically open-ended. As such you may need to adapt the attribute rules included within the policy, possibly including (fewer or) more attributes (depending on what attributes you have available in your IDP and whether the institution is willing to release them under these terms). The confguration below is an example based on the most commonly used attributes in Identity Federations today which most/all eduID.at Identity Providers should be able to generate.
See also Attribute release, from our Shibboleth IDP 2.4 documentation section.