Clarification of failFastInitialization Metadata Option

[Cantor, Scott]

> I see your message signature shows you're at Towson University.  Your
> University belongs to the same _*trust*_ federation as mine does!  Had
> your administration committed to making the effort to help this service
> provider also participate in that same trust federation, I'm virtually
> positive this fiasco would have been avoided.

Sure, but it's also avoided if the metadata is curated locally, and most often if the vendor won't join, that's your second option. There really is no scenario in which a vendor actually has metadata, won't join a federation, and could be trusted to maintain the metadata accurately for remote access while honoring the actual purpose of having the metadata refreshed. They'd botch it somehow, be it the way this one did, or by screwing up the key rotation or endpoint changes if they made them by not separating the metadata from the actual change to the system itself, etc.

Usually pulling from a vendor remotely means you're directly exposed to an automatically generated metadata instance, and automatic metadata is guaranteed to be wrong simply by definition because of how key management works.

-- Scott