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The Anonymous Authorization Entity Category can be found on the REFEDS website and text from the website should be used as the authoritative source: https://refeds.org/category/anonymous.

Implementation Guidance

Relationship to other Entity Categories

For Service Providers

By asserting participation in an Entity Category, a service provider (SP) is signaling to identity providers its minimally required user attribute bundle to successfully grant the user access. Particularly when publishing the SP’s SAML metadata in a federation, each unique SP SAML entity SHOULD assert at most one  Entity Category. For example, an SP entity asserting Anonymous Authorization category SHOULD NOT simultaneously assert the Pseudonymous Authorization category. Doing so sends conflicting messages.

If a service needs to accommodate different resource access schemes due to contractual differences, the configuration SHOULD be handled in one of the following ways:

  1. Express the difference in a separate entity metadata with a different entity ID;
  2. Negotiate and configure the attribute release agreement bi-laterally, outside the scope of the Entity Categories.

For Identity Providers

An Identity Provider (IdP) SHOULD simultaneously support all Resource Access entity categories.

Identity Provider Configuration

To properly support the Anonymous Authorization category, in addition to releasing those attributes permitted by the Anonymous Authorization category,  an Identity Provider (IdP) must take care to block any user attribute not permitted by the Anonymous Authorization category from being released to an SP asserting this category unless bilateral arrangements are in place.

All of the attributes permitted in the Anonymous Authorization category are multi-valued attributes. When configuring release, an IdP SHOULD only release values applicable to the SP the user is accessing. Further, configuring authorization attribute release may require an underlying agreement between the IdP organization and the SP organization. To accommodate these nuances, an IdP may adopt one of the following configuration strategies:

  1. Prepare SP-specific attribute release rules, using the Anonymous Authorization category as a template.
  2. Create a release rule for the Anonymous Authorization category; use a regular expression within the rule to filter values by SP.

The following example illustrates a possible Anonymous Authorization category template for the Shibboleth Identity Provider’s attribute filter policy (attribute-filter.xml). This template permits the release of attributes defined in this category to the named SP entity while explicitly blocks user identifiers from being released:

<AttributeFilterPolicy id="refedsAnonymousAuthorizationCategoryTemplate"> 
  <PolicyRequirementRule xsi:type="Requester"
      value="https://sp.example.org"/>



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