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IdP (Identity Provider): A web-based system that can authenticate a user on behalf of another system called SP (for Service Provider).

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/etc/shibboleth/shibboleth2.xml

entityID: the ID of our Service Provider (SP)

REMOTE_USER: how the REMOTE_USER attribute will be populated, in the form of a list of attribute names. Note that "ecommonsid" which is specific to HMS IT, comes first, so for this environment REMOTE_USER will be set to the value of "ecommonsid". Otherwise, the first attribute name from the list which matches the name of an attribute returned by the IdP will be used. "attributePrefix" must be set to "AJP_" so that the attributes from the "attribute-map.xml" file (see below) will be passed to Tomcat as request attributes (as opposed to request headers). See also server.xml on the same topic.

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The following specifies the entityID of the IdP to use for authentication. We also specify that we speak only SAML2 protocol.

            <SSO entityID="http://sso.med.harvard.edu/adfs/services/trust">
                SAML2
            </SSO>

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The IdP's metadata is stored in a file called idp-metadata.xml. It should be obtained from the IdP admin/maintainer.

<MetadataProvider type="XML" validate="true" path="idp-metadata.xml"/>

The attribute-map.xml file (as set by the "path" xml attribute) will specify which attributes are extracted from the IdP's response and the name of the request headers they will be available as (to the java code). More on this file later.

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