How does SAML relate to other standards and initiatives?
SAML is used by several other standards groups to provide a security and identity underpinning for their work. XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) is an OASIS Standard, an XML-based language for access control that has been standardized in OASIS. XACML describes both an access control policy language and a request/response language. The policy language is used to express access control policies (‘who can do what when’). The request/response language expresses queries about whether a particular access should be allowed (requests) and describes answers to those queries (responses). The newest versions of XACML and SAML have been designed to complement each other; for example, an XACML policy can specify what a provider should do when it receives a SAML assertion, and XACML-based attributes can be expressed in SAML. WS-Security is an OASIS Standard that specifies how SOAP messages can have their integrity and confidentiality ensured. WS-Security defines a framework for secur
