SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design
With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the late aughts, IT departments needed a way for users to authenticate to many new web services. SAML and the burgeoning single sign-on (SSO) industry fulfilled this need. However, SAML is being crushed under the weight of its own complexity.
- ▪With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the late aughts, IT departments needed a way for users to authenticate to many new web services.
- ▪SAML and the burgeoning single sign-on (SSO) industry fulfilled this need.
- ▪However, SAML is being crushed under the weight of its own complexity.
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| Original publisher | The Trail of Bits Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/09/21/saml-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:57:17 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T19:23:57.148Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T19:23:57.148Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cPL0Nt7hcZ_j · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
SAML: A fractal of bad designMatt SchwagerSeptember 21, 2026authentication, vulnerabilitiesPage contentSAML and the birth of the SSO industryA crack in the armorA fractal of bad designBuilt on XMLCanonicalizationEnveloped signatures“Kitchen-sink” designOssificationAll roads lead to OIDCBorn out of academia and raised in corporate IT departments, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication protocol continues to be a staple in these organizations. However, it’s time for it to retire. With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the late aughts, IT departments needed a way for users to authenticate to many new web services. SAML and the burgeoning single sign-on (SSO) industry fulfilled this need.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Trail of Bits Blog.
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