Automatic configuration and continuation of federation relationships

A computer program product for implementing a method for automatically continuing an established federation relationship between at least two federation computer systems, the computer program product comprising one or more recordable-type storage devices having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause the computing system to perform the method, the method comprising:

• an act of determining that a federation relationship has been established between a first federation computer system and a second federation computer system using metadata signed with a digital signature trusted by both computer systems;
• an act of determining that one or more changes to the metadata have occurred causing the trusted federation relationship to become invalid;
• an act of a determining which settings used to establish the trusted federation relationship are to be updated based on the changes to the metadata;
• an act of updating those portions of the metadata determined to require a change;
• an act of automatically re-establishing the federation relationship between the first and second federation computer systems using the updated metadata;
• and
• an act of validating the updated metadata, including:
• an act of attempting to validate a digital signature of the metadata at an application level of a network stack;
• an act of determining that the validation at the application layer was unsuccessful;
• an act of the extracting first identity information from the digital signature;
• and
• an act of validating the digital signature at the protocol level of the network stack, including validating that second identity information used to establish a secure protocol connection at the second level of the network stack matches the first identity information that was extracted from the digital signature.

A computer system comprising the following:

• one or more processors;
• system memory;
• one or more computer-readable storage media having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, causes the computing system to perform a method for establishing the integrity of a portion of data on at least one level of a plurality of network stack levels, the method comprising the following:
• an act of a provider federation computer system receiving a digital signature corresponding to a user, wherein the digital signature includes the user's identity and other federation relationship information configured to establish a trusted federation relationship between the provider federation computer system and a customer federation computer system;
• an act of the provider federation computer system attempting to validate the received digital signature at the application level of a network stack;
• an act of the provider federation computer system determining that the validation at the application layer was unsuccessful;
• and
• based on determining that the validation at the application layer was unsuccessful:
• an act of the provider federation computer system extracting first identity information from the digital signature;
• and
• an act of the provider federation computer system validating the received digital signature at the protocol level of the network stack, including validating that second identity information used to establish a secure protocol connection at the second level of the network stack matches the first identity information that was extracted from the digital signature.