You are located in service: Identity Management

Restricting the Selection of IdentityProviders

Restricting the Selection of IdentityProviders

guide

With the update to IdentityProvider 3.3, the RWTH Aachen central Discovery Service (DS) is no longer available. To limit the choice of identity providers in the future, you can use the Shibboleth Embedded Discovery Service (EDS).

Embedded Discovery Service (EDS)

The EDS is a set of Java scripts that can be embedded in any HTML pages and works with the discovery feed generated by the Shibboleth SP from version 2.4 (/Shibboleth.sso/DiscoFeed). This is (IdP) data in JSON format that is generated from the metadata available via one or more MetadataProvider elements - after applying any MetadataFilters, e.g. a whitelist of entity IDs of authorized IdPs or an Entity Category. In this way, an entity selection can be realized with little effort, which only contains IdPs of entities whose users should have access to the service protected by the ServiceProvider (SP).

The official documentation for the EDS can be found in the Shibboleth Wiki (opens in new tab).

Here is a short guide on how to install the EDS yourself:

Configuration of the ServiceProvider (usually under /etc/shibblet/shibboleth2.xml):

<SSO discoveryProtocol="SAMLDS" discoveryURL="https://sp.uni-beispiel.de/ds/index.html">
  SAML2
</SSO>
  
<!-- usually in combination with a MetadataFilter: -->
  
<MetadataProvider type="Chaining">
   <MetadataProvider type="XML"
         uri="https://www.aai.dfn.de/fileadmin/metadata/DFN-AAI-Basic-metadata.xml"
         backingFilePath="DFN-AAI-Basic-metadata.xml"
         minRefreshDelay="240" reloadInterval="300">
      <MetadataFilter type="RequireValidUntil" maxValidityInterval="604800"/>
      <MetadataFilter type="Signature" certificate="/etc/ssl/aai/dfn-aai.pem" />
      <MetadataFilter type="Whitelist">
         <Include>https://idp.uni-beispiel1.de/idp/shibboleth</Include>
         <Include>https://idp.uni-beispiel2.de/idp/shibboleth</Include>
         <Include>https://idp.uni-beispiel3.de/idp/shibboleth</Include>
      </MetadataFilter>
   </MetadataProvider>
   <!-- further MetadataProvider elements if required -->
</MetadataProvider>

Configuration of the Web Server

Add to VHost configuration:

Alias /ds /var/www/html/
<Location /ds>
  Require all granted
</Location>

last changed on 08/07/2026

How did this content help you?

(opens in new tab)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 Germany License (opens in new tab)