Example SAML authentication exchange:
- User goes to https://www.hathitrust.org, selects Login and chooses their home institution
- We redirect to the SingleSignOnService listed in the identity provider metadata, for example (for Michigan) https://shibboleth.umich.edu/idp/profile/SAML2/Redirect/SSO, and append the SAML request base64 encoded in the parameter "SAMLRequest". (There are some other options for the exact protocol here as well)
The SAML DevTools Extension for Chrome can be helpful in debugging whether or not everything is working as expected.
The SAML request we generate looks like