Tim Poe & Steve Thorpe {tpoe, MCNC All-Staff Meeting March 19, 2009 What is Federated ID Management and Why Should You Care?

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Outline Motivation Example Services Requirements Underlying Technology NCTrust Federation Pilot Demo 2

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Motivation Many NC institutions desire access to remote protected web-based services  17 UNC system institutions  115 LEAs, thousands of K-12 schools  58 community colleges  36 independent colleges / universities  Plus many other government / educational / commercial organizations Desire is for access to be efficient, cost effective, quick, secure, and user-friendly. Federated ID Management technologies enable such access 3

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 ATM machines - An Early Example of Federated ID Management Thousands of banks - Federated Millions of users (bank customers) User login (ATM card) and password (PIN) maintained by the user’s home institution (Bank) Other institutions give service ($) access to remote users, based on trusting the login and password that’s maintained by the home institution Today we’re doing something similar, only we’re serving Web-based services rather than $ 4

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Example – Confluence Confluence is a web-based wiki service that fosters collaboration among multiple institutions Federated ID Management technologies can alleviate MCNC’s current need for in-house management of accounts for outside users Each home institution would manage their *own* accounts 5

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Example - NCLive NCLive provides access to eJournals, etc. for libraries, higher-ed and increasingly K-12 Want ease of resource accessibility yet must adhere to licenses of various products being distributed, e.g. certain content might be allowed only for:  Students  K-20 staff  Chemistry teachers  etc. 6

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Examples - VCL NCSU’s Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a web service that allows reservations of a computer with a desired set of applications, then remote access over the Internet You can use applications such as Matlab, Maple, SAS, Solidworks, and many others. Linux, Solaris and numerous Windows environments are available Due to licensing and resource limitations, access must be limited to certain user communities 7

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Other Examples How about a service to enable cross-institutional course registration for access to distance learning from a different university in the UNC system? Federated ID Management technologies can facilitate resource utilization across NCREN by enabling these and other web-based services much more efficiently, saving $ for MCNC and the NCREN community 8 How about a service for elementary school kids to access privately licensed PBS, CSPAN, and History Channel video content through the internet?

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Requirements Prevent users having to know yet-another password Prevent system administrators having to add yet-another account Avoid logins becoming out of date Enable easier scaling of web-based applications to include multiple additional users/organizations Must know people are who they say they are, with up-to- date accuracy With potentially hundreds of thousands of people involved, need the home institutions to be responsible for account administration 9

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Underlying Technology: Shibboleth 10 Shibboleth is open source software for web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries Allows informed authorization decisions for protected web service access in a privacy-preserving manner Uses Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to provide federated single sign-on and attribute exchange framework Provides extended privacy functionality allowing the browser user and their home site to control the attributes released to each application

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 11 Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP)Shibboleth Service Provider (SP) (IdP is a J2EE app)(shibd daemon maintains state) (mod_shib gets attributes from shibd and protects web apps) Access to protected service (web app) is controlled by shib gatekeeper LDAP Server Obligatory Geek Diagram - Simplified (the only one, we promise ! ) 1. Student is at Starbucks 2. IdP is at his school 3. Protected Web Service is at a university 4. IdP/SP communication via SAML attributes exchanged through the browser session

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 NCTrust Federation Pilot MCNC and partners have convened the NC Trust Pilot Goal: create a Federation to test web resource sharing among several K-20 organizations within NC  Adding K-12 into the mix is a unique aspect NCTrust utilizes the national InCommon Federation infrastructure  Provides a trust mechanism allowing each organization to certify its operational practices MCNC is helping partners with tech / installation support 12 NC DPI North Carolina Learning Object Repository ? (tbd)

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Shibboleth Training Workshops 1.5 day workshops were hosted by MCNC in October 2008 and February 2009 Instructors: Shilen Patel and Rob Carter (Duke), Gonz Guzman (MCNC) Approximately 45 participants total There’s an excellent video archive of the workshop, thanks to Bryon and Chad 13

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 MOU and InCommon Paperwork in Various Stages of Completion… First demos starting now! Paperwork is MUCH harder / slower than technical work! (though the technical parts are certainly not trivial)

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 As  Log onto test service, to see some attributes  Access Internet2’s Confluence site As  Log onto NCSU’s VCL site, check for images As  Log onto NCSU’s VCL site, check for images and see a different list based on my NCSU status 15 Demo

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Future Steps Connect services among the NCTrust community  VCL  NCLive  MCNC’s confluence site is a likely candidate  Others? Recommendations on best model of state-wide federation to meet the needs of the K-20 educational community in North Carolina  To cover funding, operations, governance, etc. Pilot runs through December

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Key Takeaways We believe Federated ID Management can enable more effective resource sharing among the NCREN community  Secure  Efficient  Scalable  Accessible  Saves $  Not to mention it’s a GREEN technology Fostering adoption of FIM technologies is another way of Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 17

Connecting North Carolina’s Future Today 3/19/09 Thank You Special thanks to MCNC’s Gonz Guzman, Tom Throckmorton, Kambiz Aghaiepour, Neal Bullins, Carole Bruhn, Keith Venters, Chris Caswell, Bryon Coltrane, and Chad Pritchard who all helped this effort Also thanks to the many Federated ID Task Force members from throughout the NCREN community that are participating with us in the NCTrust pilot project Questions? 18