Assurance

["Basney, Jim" <>]

>>>Would a formal institutional declaration of compliance with the MFA
>>>profile cause you to trust its MFA assertions more?
>> 
>> Yes.
>
>Can I ask why? What's the difference between self-asserting a category
>and self-asserting the same data in an assertion?

I think my answer is the same for Base Level, MFA, Silver, or Bronze. Our
trust fabric is based on contractual agreements between InCommon LLC and
its participants, and that trust is operationalized via the federation
metadata. Knowing that an institutional representative made a declaration
to InCommon (either via an Assurance Addendum or via a checkbox on the
Federation Manager), subject to the Participation Agreement, gives me
greater trust in the organization's compliance with an InCommon standard
than I get from IdP-SP bidirectional communication alone.

-Jim