Lesson 10 — Putting It All Together | Learn OpenID Federation

Scenario: A Student Logs In to a Research Portal

This capstone walkthrough follows a complete, real-world scenario that uses every concept from the previous 9 lessons.

Trust Anchor: edu-federation.gov

Intermediate: uni-alliance.edu

OpenID Provider: login.state-university.edu

Relying Party: research-portal.gov

Step 1 of 14

1. TA publishes Entity Configuration

Setup

Trust Anchor edu-federation.gov publishes its Entity Configuration at .well-known/openid-federation (§9). It contains the TA's JWKS, federation endpoints, and trust_mark_issuers.

Concept Recap — Everything You Learned

L1Federation

Scalable trust hierarchy instead of N x N bilateral agreements

L2Entities & Roles

TA, Intermediate, OP, RP — each with clear responsibilities

L3Entity Statements

Self-signed Entity Configs and superior-signed Subordinate Statements

L4Trust Chains

Linked sequence of signed statements from leaf to anchor

L5Chain Resolution

Bottom-up algorithm following authority_hints

L6Metadata & Policy

Capabilities described, constrained by cascade of policies

L7Trust Marks

Certified badges verifying compliance requirements

L8Endpoints

9 HTTP APIs for discovery, fetch, resolve, and registration

L9Registration

Automatic (on-the-fly) or explicit (pre-registered)

Congratulations!

You've completed the core curriculum. Continue to the Advanced and Going Deeper sections to explore topology design, real-world use cases, and hands-on exercises.