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Summary
There is a significant potential benefit in making STORK interoperable with industry-standard SAML profiles. STORK could provide low-cost, high assurance eIDs, and the established SAML ecosystem could enrich STORK with a broad set of products, services and tools. This could help STORK to gain significantly faster access to existing federations.
While STORK is SAML-compliant in many respects, it had failed so far to use certain established SAML specifications - in particular the Kantara eGov Interoperability profile. Partially that is owned to use case specific conditions, partially that happened without compelling technical reason. This is no issue within the STORK cross-border infrastructure, but less desirable for the national interfaces.
The alignment of the STORK SAML interface towards SPs (and IdPs in a lesser degree) with industry standards should be pursued to promote the integration of STORK into existing and future federations, and to reduce deployment and operational cost. The goal of this effort is to achieve a technical harmonization that is depicted like this:
STORK's internal mechanics between PEPS and other actors that already use the STORK Interface spec would work unmodified. Towards other deployments STORK would provide a standardized interface that is easy to deploy and supported by a variety of products.
