Entity Statement
Contents
Full Title or Meme
A digital document that describes a digital Entity typically signed by a trusted issuer or Authority.
Context
On the Identity Management page different roles are defined for Entities.
Problems
There have been several attempts to get information from web sites to users. These have diverged in unexpected ways based on the approach taken.
Solutions
Quite a few structures have been defined to describe entities. The Entity Statement created in the OpenID Connect Federation document is taken as be base for comparison with several others in the table below.
| Entity Statement | HL7 capability | X.509 certificate | DID Document | Notes |
| End Points | End Points | DNS range | one key instance | collection of scopes |
| n/a | persistent URI | ver 3, Serial No. | @context | Document ID - may include status & url to this or current version of doc |
| n/a | s/w app name | may include status & a human readable description of function | ||
| software | very specific software version (GUID?) incl. trade name, release date | |||
| iss | publisher | Issuer | controller | The entity identifier of the issuer of the statement may incl. contact |
| scope? | use context | |||
| grant_types? | purpose | EKU | ||
| jurisdiction | who's laws apply? | |||
| sub | Subject DN | id | The entity identifier of the subject | |
| authn method | ||||
| iat | date published | Not Before | The time the statement was issued or start validity | |
| exp | Not After | Expiration time when the statement MUST NOT be used for new signatures | ||
| jwks | public key | publicKeyPem | public part of the subject entity's signing keys | |
| authority_hints | imports | chain | blockchain | entities that may issue an entity statement about the issuer entity |
| metadata | protocol specific metadata claims | |||
| metadata_policy | type followed by organization information | |||
| constraints | trust chain contraints | |||
| crit | claims that MUST be understood and processed. | |||
| metadata type | kind of app | overall purpose of this type of installation | ||
| policy | instantiates | uri of detailed description (level confusion) | ||
| sub_is_leaf | is the subject considered a leaf entity | |||
| organization_name | implementation | Legal entity | incl contact, uri. not very exact correspondence (level confusion) | |
| response mode | rest | How the request & response are put into http incl. security choices | ||
| errors | messaging | needs to be part of good implementation support | ||
| documentation | seems out-of-place? | |||
| federation | s/w app | PKI | self ID | context |
| aud | audience = the entity that is specifically targeted by this statement. |
HL7 FHIR Capability Statement
The FHIR spec includes a definition of a Resource Capability Statement. Which is similar in purpose to the Entity Statement but includes FHIR specific fields. To quote the spec "A Capability Statement documents a set of capabilities (behaviors) of a FHIR Server for a particular version of FHIR that may be used as a statement of actual server functionality or a statement of required or desired server implementation.".
