Circles of Trust

Circles of trust need to be created to define trust relationships among identity providers and service providers. A circle of trust is a grouping of service providers (with at least one identity provider) that have, in place, pertinent business agreements regarding how they will do business and interact with identities. Any identity provider or service provider within a circle of trust will honor requests and information that come from other providers in the same circle. Requests and information will be rejected if communicating providers are not part of the same circle of trust. In the SAML v2 Plug-in for Federation Services, circles of trust are created using the saml2meta command-line interface, allowing you to configure technologically the participants and rules drawn in the business agreements. Instructions on how to use the saml2meta command-line interface to manage circles of trust is in Managing Circles of Trust using saml2meta.