Stellar Ecosystem Proposal 2 was originally created on October 30, 3017 and then updated two years later.
SEP 2 relates to the Stellar federation protocol which ties a Stellar address to additional information about a user. For instance, the Stellar address associated with an account is affiliated with a G address. The federation protocol is consistent across domains and platforms, offering interoperability throughout the Stellar Network.
In the future, when the federation address is also tied to user biometrics, the need to safeguard a user key and password will be eliminated, ensuring greater security and ease of access. The only way to transition the whole world onto the platform is to make it easy to use. If people have to worry about losing all their money because they lose a pass key, then you have a system that keeps people in fear and will not be easily adopted.
Federation Address Lookup
If you have a Stellar address, you can use the federation endpoint to find the corresponding account ID. Additionally, you can perform reverse federation to retrieve Stellar addresses from account IDs or transaction IDs. This feature is particularly helpful for identifying the sender of a payment.
Federation addresses can be researched by the following HTTP GET requests: name, forward (Used for forwarding the payment on to a different network or different financial institution.), ID, or taxid.
The federation server must provide a suitable HTTP status code, headers, and a JSON response.
Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEPs) set the standards for building infrastructure on the Stellar network. These guidelines ensure smooth interactions between various users, such as asset issuers, wallets, exchanges, and other service providers, through a standardized integration method. SEPs usually detail both server-side and client-side interaction aspects, acting as a blueprint that allows connections with multiple parties without having to start from scratch each time.
Examples of Federation Protocols
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Web Services Federation (WS-Federation)
WS-Federation (WS-Fed)1 is an extension of the WS-Security framework and enhances the capabilities of WS-Trust. It allows SOAP applications and web services to directly utilize its features. WS-Fed is a protocol used to negotiate token issuance, making it suitable for applications like those based on Windows Identity Foundation, as well as identity providers such as Active Directory Federation Services or Azure AppFabric Access Control Service.
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Wave Federation Protocol
An open protocol that builds upon the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It is utilized in Apache Wave to facilitate near real-time communication between wave servers.<sup2
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Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
Defined by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)3 is an XML-based, open-standard protocol. SAML is an open federation standard that allows an identity provider (IdP) to authenticate users and then pass an authentication token to a service provider (SP). This enables the SP to function without performing its own authentication, facilitating the integration of both internal and external users. SAML allows security credentials to be shared with an SP across a network, typically an application or service.
SAML supports secure, cross-domain communication between public cloud systems and other SAML-enabled systems, as well as various identity management systems located on-premises or in different clouds. With SAML, you can provide a single sign-on (SSO) experience for users across any two applications that support the SAML protocol and services, allowing SSO to handle multiple security functions on behalf of one or more applications.
SAML pertains to the XML variant language used to encode this information and includes various protocol messages and profiles that are part of the standard.
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Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)4 is an open, vendor-neutral, industry-standard application protocol designed for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. It allows for the management and retrieval of directory data in a distributed environment.
1https://auth0.com/docs/authenticate/protocols/ws-fed-protocol
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol
3https://www.oracle.com/security/cloud-security/what-is-saml/
4https://github.com/stellar/stellar-protocol/blob/master/ecosystem/sep-0002.md
