Terminology Index

Glossary

2953 terms

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32

SAML

Security Assertion Markup Language: a long-standing federation standard for single sign-on, where an identity provider asserts a user's identity to a service provider via signed XML messages.

SAML lets an identity provider authenticate a user once and assert that identity to multiple service providers via cryptographically signed XML assertions, enabling SSO across many applications. It is widely used in enterprise federation and remains a workhorse of identity, even as newer protocols like OpenID Connect grow. Understanding SAML, its assertions, signatures, and trust relationships, is essential to enterprise IAM and to securing federated identity correctly, including avoiding well-known SAML bypass classes.

Introduced in: Identity and Access Management

Examples

  • An IdP issuing a signed SAML assertion to a service provider for SSO.
  • Configuring trust between an enterprise IdP and a SaaS service via SAML.
  • Validating SAML signatures to prevent assertion-tampering attacks.