Improving OpenID Connect federation's interoperability with web semantics

Companies adhere to federate environments in order to add value to their businesses by aggregating third parties services. Cloud computing comes in hand in this process speeding up the development and deployment of new service providers (SPs) and identity providers (IdPs) to be used into a federated environment. However, IdPs and SPs of OpenID Connect federations have a strong dependency on each other, they have to use the very same attribute names in order to exchange data. Our proposal lowers the dependency between IdPs and SPs using web semantics; instead of an agreement at a lower level such as attributes names, we propose that IdPs and SPs establish an agreement on the ontology to be used. Therefore, the name of attributes would not matter, but the semantic concept that attributes are associated with. Further, our proposal was added and tested into the OpenId Connect Implementation called MITREid Connect.