SP registration

Generally, Shibboleth SPs need to be 'recognised' by the Identity Providers (IdPs) against which they want to authenticate people. This is normally handled by joining one or more 'federations' and registering SPs with it. Federations are primevally administrative organisations that reduce the need for every SP to register individually with every IdP with which it wants to interwork. Operators of SPs in the University currently have three choices:

Remain Anonymous

The Raven IdP is unusual in that it will provide authentication services and some attributes to 'anonymous' SPs. As a result it is possible to avoid registering at all. The downside to this is that Raven will describe your service as 'Anonymous' whan asking people for permission to release information to you, and only a limited number of attributes will be released (see Attributes released by the Raven IdP - Completely unregistered.

However one of the attributes that is released carries the authenticated user's 'eduPerson Principal Name' which includes their CRSid. This may be sufficient for replacing UcamWebauth-based functionality.

An anonymous SP is unlikely to be able to authenticate users against any IdPs other than the one provided by Raven.

Register in the 'Ucam federation'

University SPs that are registered in either the 'Ucam federation' or the UK federation receive a much larger list of attributes - see Attributes released by the Raven IdP - Registered SPs and Attributes released by the Raven IdP University SPs.