05 October 2001 Directories: The Next Stage Keith Hazelton, Senior IT Architect University of Wisconsin-Madison Keith Hazelton, Senior IT Architect University of Wisconsin-Madison

5-Oct-01 2 N O T E ! ! ! For this morning’s session, send questions via to: internet2.edu

5-Oct-01 3 Directories, the Next Stage: Outline MACE-Dir growth courtesy of NMI Game plan for this morning’s session Projects directly under MACE-Dir eduPerson, other object classes Shibboleth support Affiliated directories & VidMid dir bits

5-Oct-01 4 MACE-Dir growth courtesy of NMI NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) NSF-funded program ($12m) to establish standard environment for scientific and educational computing Recipients: Internet2, Educause, SURA, Grids

5-Oct-01 5 MACE-Dir growth courtesy of NMI Directory work prominent in Internet2 NMI Panelists: volunteers of yesteryear, their home institutions will now be reimbursed The top tasks for year one? Watch today’s presentations

5-Oct-01 6 MACE-Dir growth courtesy of NMI I2 Middleware Architecture Committee for Education Shibboleth VidMid HEPKIMACE-Dir Groups MetadirAffil. Dirs....

5-Oct-01 7 MACE-Dir growth courtesy of NMI MACE-Dir Technical Advisory Board World class experts like: David Chadwick (X.500 fame) Kurt Zeilenga (IBM, OpenLDAP) Kim Cameron (MS, Zoomit) & more To stress-test and improve our ideas

5-Oct-01 8 Gameplan for this session Keith Hazelton: eduObjects, affiliated dirs. Michael Gettes: Dir. of Dirs. for Higher Ed. Tom Barton: Groups and roles in directories Richard Jones: Metadirectories Panel discussion / Q & A

5-Oct-01 9 eduPerson, other eduObject classes eduObjects: People, Organizations, Services, Resources,… Widely implemented common attributes Extensible object classes (your attr.here) Lower impedance in application access to info No need to invest in your own wheel factory

5-Oct eduPerson, other eduObject classes The tough parts: Being smart in picking the attributes worth the long, hard journey to consensus Being modest about how much of the ocean to boil Engaging the critical stakeholders Promulgating achieved goodness

5-Oct eduObject win: Shibboleth support Authenticate locally, access resources globally Secure sharing of authorization information between home institution and target site eduOrganization information essential

5-Oct eduObject win: Shibboleth support Person taking a for-credit course at a different institution: Need to define, create and share new data elements such as class names, majors, without risking naming chaos Need to define equivalency mappings

5-Oct eduObject win: Shibboleth support And further out there: What if we had shareable object classes that could carry access control policies? A more flexible and dynamic Shibboleth

5-Oct Affiliated directories Discarded goal: Single huge institutional directory with all attributes anyone and any application will ever need New goal: One institutional directory that manages identity across IT systems; Plus a federation of special-purpose directories with complementary contents

5-Oct Affiliated directories wins If we find a solid approach and offer tools: NASA could launch object classes at the same time as a new International Space Station experimental module Auto-linked to the assigned investigators at research centers and universities Keep investigator contact info current

5-Oct Affiliated directories wins MACE-VidMid could create vendor supported solution for authenticated, controlled access to video streams Basic person information in general purpose directory Video attributes in application-specific directory Mappings from person to workstation

5-Oct Affiliated directories: the challenges How to associate an attribute value with its ultimate, authoritative source, and trust that it has not been altered in transit Digital signatures look like part of the solution How to agree upon who is authoritative for what

5-Oct Affiliated directories: the challenges How to link identities across directories How to make the linkage persistent in the face of identifier changes How not to degrade privacy as information repositories aggregate bits and pieces of personal information

5-Oct Affiliated directories: the challenges Not to mention synchronizing data without benefit of synchronization standards If MACE-Dir and its working groups can meet challenges such as these, NMI will have gotten real value for its investment

5-Oct Conclusion Track NMI Directory work, or better yet, participate