1. What is Federated ID Management and Why Should You Care?
11/28/2018
What is Federated ID Management and Why Should You Care?
Tim Poe & Steve Thorpe
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MCNC All-Staff Meeting
March 19, 2009

2. Outline Motivation Example Services Benefits Underlying Technology
NCTrust Federation Pilot
Demo

3. Motivation
Many NC institutions desire access to remote protected web-based services
17 UNC system institutions
115 LEAs, 2,500+ 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

4. 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 providing Web-based services rather than $

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. Other Examples
How about a service for elementary school kids to access privately licensed PBS, CSPAN, and Discovery Learning video content through the internet?
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

9. Benefits of Federated ID
Prevents users from having to know yet-another password
Prevents system administrators from having to add yet- another account
Avoids logins becoming out of date
Enables easier scaling of web-based applications to include multiple additional users/organizations
Confidence that users are who they say they are, with up-to-date accuracy
Home institutions reliably manage their own user accounts

10. Underlying Technology: Shibboleth
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

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

12. NCTrust Federation Pilot
DPI
North Carolina
Learning Object Repository
? (tbd)
UNC-GA is a “Friend of NCTrust”
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

13. Shibboleth Training Workshops
1.5 day workshops were hosted by MCNC in October 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

14. MOU and InCommon Paperwork in Various Stages of Completion…
Paperwork is MUCH harder / slower than technical work!
(though the technical parts are certainly not trivial)
First demos starting now!

15. Demo As thorpe@mcnc.org: As srthorpe@unc.edu: As srthorpe@ncsu.edu:
Access Internet2’s Confluence site
Log onto test service, to see attributes 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

16. Future Steps Connect services among the NCTrust community
VCL
NCLive
MCNC’s confluence site is a likely candidate
Others?
Integrate with the recently created UNC Federation
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 2009

17. 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

18. Thank You
Special thanks to MCNC’s Gonz Guzman, Tom Throckmorton, Kambiz Aghaiepour, Neal Bullins, Carole Bruhn, Keith Venters, Chris Caswell, Bryon Coltrane, Chad Pritchard, and John Moore 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
Finally thanks to a “Friend of NCTrust”, Steven Hopper from UNC-GA
Questions?