3.1.1 Abstract Data Model

Proper operation of the protocol requires that a requestor IP/STS and a relying party maintain configuration information that describes the entities with which they exchange protocol messages. This section describes an abstract data model for maintaining that configuration information.

The following subsections describe a conceptual model of possible data organization that an implementation maintains to participate in this protocol. The described organization is provided to help explain how the protocol behaves. This specification does not mandate that implementations adhere to this model as long as their external behavior is consistent with that described in this document.

Note The conceptual data model can be implemented using a variety of techniques. Windows behavior is described for each data item at the end of the appropriate subsection.