OpenAthens Ideas Portal

We're always looking for ways to improve our products, and we'd love your input to help us make that happen. Your suggestions will guide us in deciding where we should focus our future research and development.

Just sign in with your email to share your thoughts or vote for ideas you like—it'll help them get noticed!


Here’s how the portal is organised:

  • Librarians (Identity Providers): Share ideas that help organisations that manage user identities and provide access to online content and services. This includes improving the experience for students and researchers.

  • Publishers (Service Providers): Share ideas for organisations that offer content and services.


Guidance on using this portal

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Status Feedback wanted
Workspace Librarians
Categories Activating resources
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 31, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Ability to specify signing algorithm for custom SAML resources

Service providers sometimes require signatures to use a specific algorithm, like SHA-256, for custom SAML connections. Currently, if the signing algorithm is not explicitely specified in the SP metadata within a signature block, OpenAthens will default to SHA-1 even if the x509 certificate has an SHA-256 fingerprint.

SP's do not always specify SHA-256 signing algorithm in the metadata they provide, and since SAML metadata is typically auto-generated, having them add it to the metadata so OpenAthens sends signatures using SHA-256 can be an uphill battle.

The ability to specify SHA-256 for custom SAML resources would negate the need to go back and forth with the SP to obtain metadata with SHA-256 specified in the XML metadata they provide. The vast majority of IdP's (Okta, Azure, etc.) have this capability when configuring resources, OpenAthens should have this capability as well. Additionally, SHA-1 is largely obsolete, and SHA-256 should be the defaulted algorithm when the x509 certificate has an SHA-256 fingerprint as SHA-256 has largely replaced SHA-1 as the preferred SAML signing algorithm.

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? Yes
Idea type Time saver, Ease of use of specific or groups of tasks/actions
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