CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESEARCHERS APAN 41 – TF-IAM 27 January 2016

Why Does Federated Identity Management Matter to Researchers? Researchers need to collaborate globally as part of Virtual Organizations (VOs) Funding may come from around the world Solving the “Buried Scholar” problem Improve the reputation of both the campus and the researcher by having a campus-branded identity More efficiently allocate resources by having federated identity as a campus service, rather than having individual research departments build this on their own Researchers are asking for this!

Research on Researcher Needs Original FIM4R paper in 2012 described a set of recommendations to the research communities, technology providers, and funding agencies The core use cases came from large research organizations with funding The “Advancing Technologies and Federated Communities”, also in 2012, described a set of recommendations around technology, policy, funding, and legal issues. A more generalized approach than the FIM paper, but the recommendations are largely the same

Findings Summarized Federated technologies are good. Take advantage of them. The infrastructure needs to be improved to take advantage of federated technologies. Do it. Relying on the older models of local account creation and IP-based ACLs is easier. This is a very limited view. Stop it. If you can’t fix it all yourself (and you can’t), facilitate the efforts of groups that can. Build relationships, target your spending or funding to make the biggest impact.

Researchers and VOs Researchers often collaborate as part of larger non-legal entities Those non-legal entities, VOs, have few resources to support full identity management systems VOs are looking to depend on federated identity, with researcher information managed at the researcher’s home institution

Problems Persist Progress is slow in addressing the findings of FIM4R Remember: a VO is often not a legal entity in and of itself – so who could sign any kind of legal agreement to participate in a federation? implementing federation involves a learning curve to properly implement things like single sign on (SSO) – who handles that within the VO? not all participants will even be a member of an institution that is part of a federation – how can they be brought on-board? VOs are the test case that expands into discussing federation outside of academia. Need to make the story of federation more compelling to VOs. Campuses can start by establishing identity management systems, joining federations, and RELEASING ATTRIBUTES.

Tools and Services Collaboration Management Systems Perun – OpenConext – COmanage – middleware/comanage/ middleware/comanage/ Video conferencing with support for SAML BigBlueButton - WebEx – Jitsi Meet - Wikis with support for SAML Confluence - Dokuwiki - Trac - Software Development Jenkins - JFrog Artifactory GitHub – There are more. Lots more. Progress is being made here. But remember, all these tools and services require attributes...