Prove the validity of claims

The problem that the common capbility has to address is to prove the validity of claims made by different parties, e.g that a party is a member of a group or virtual organisation. The claims checking may have to talk to other components of the same type either at a peer level or at a higher level such as a separate Virtual Organization level or a trusted third party. The choice here is dependent on algorithm used.

There are two stages to this common capability: Making a claim and validating a claim.

Making a claim: A claimant (e.g the policy management system) contacts the claims checking module presenting it with a claim that needs to be validated (e.g that a message is from a member of a federation). A cryptographic token is returned. An intermediary step might be to check a VO-level or third-party claims checking module, but there are algorithms which exist that purely peer-based.

Validating a claim: The message along with the claims are received and passed to the claims checking module for checking. Either the claims checking module already has the appropriate keys to validate the claim (peer algorithm) or else it will check a VO-level or third-party claims checking module.