Building interoperable AAI for researchers (1C)

Chair:  Licia Florio (GÉANT)

Scientific research is at the heart of every European University. Nowadays, such research is no longer an isolated activity, but has evolved into extensive collaboration between networks of researchers in multiple countries. What have e-Infrastructures been doing in the field of AAI to support this?

This session provides an overview of AARC project results matured during the first year.  AARC, which started in May 2015, champions federated access (eduGAIN) to seek interoperability among existing R&E authentication and authorisation infrastructures. To achieve this, AARC is working to deliver a policy and technical framework to aid research and e-infrastructures to (re)design interoperable AAIs. 

The session will start with an overview on eduGAIN (Brook Schofield), the interfederation service that spans 38 of the 61 identity federations and 3200 of the 11000 federated identity providers and services that we can map on the globe.

It will then present the AARC blueprint architecture (Christos Kanellopoulos), which defines a set of building blocks and implementation patterns to guide architects in designing AAIs.  The AARC architecture is meant to be a technology agnostic and does not require each of the proposed components to be implemented.

Two examples of implementation of the blueprint architecture will be presented; the EGI check in service (Peter Solagna) and eduTEAMs (Niels van Dijk). 

The EGI Check in service enables researchers from different organisation participating in eduGAIN to access the EGI services using the same credentials they are using at their home organisation. The EGI AAI CheckIn service can connect to existing community based AAIs and it can be offered as an “Identity Access Management as a Service” to those communities, which do not have or do not want to operate their own AAIs.

GÉANT has been working to develop eduTEAMS, a service that offers a platform to support authentication and authorisation aspects for virtual collaborations. eduTEAMS is now in pilot, so this talk will present the platform, will showcase the findings of the market analysis, technical direction and the proposed model for sustaining the platform. In addition, the results of the community pilots will be discussed

Target Audience
New research infrastructures interested in developing inter-operable AAIs and e-infrastructures that plan to share resources among each other.
 

Benefits for Audience
- Better understanding of the AARC project 
- Building blocks to design inter-operable AAIs 
- Sustainability aspects