1. Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 Andrea Biancini Towards a Federation as a Service From IdP in the Cloud project to FaaS

2. Andrea Biancini 2 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 Agenda What is an Identity Federation What needs to be done to operate a Federation Introduction: the theoretical standpoints What have we done? IdP in the cloud project Project implementation Benefits and project results What we learnt and did to grow a Federation Extending this approach to Federation managers Identifying the key processes Implementing a Federation «appliance» ELCIRA: activities and expected benefits The ongoing project activities

3. Andrea Biancini 3 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 What is an Identity Federation  An Identity Federation is a collection of organizations that agree to interoperate under a certain rule to manage user identities.  Within a Federation different organizations cooperate in managing identities by taking care of their users and services.  The Federation builds a global trust within the different organizations.

4. Andrea Biancini 4 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 What needs to be done to operate a Fed.  Participants have to:  Define procedures to create and manage an IdP;  Define procedures to create and manage an SP.  Federation managers have to:  Registering an entity (IdP or SP) in the Federation  Validating metadata information toward Federation policies;  Performing all security controls and signing metadata;  Guiding the participants in the implementation of an Identity Management policy.  Signing and distributing the Metadata.  Providing accessory services (like information pages or Discovery Service).

5. Andrea Biancini 5 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 What we learnt from our communities  From a participant’s point of view, the more complex task is that of creating and managing an IdP.  In this activity, in fact, the participant has to:  Manage a lot of different technologies (Shibboleth, Tomcat, LDAP, security on the server, …);  Monitor and update constantly the technical infrastructure (for security and quality of service);  Manage privacy and identity management policies;  Manage users and passwords.  Many entities do not have enough skills or resources to manage them all!

6. Andrea Biancini 6 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 The answer to this problem!  To tackle this problem, GARR started the “IdP in the cloud” service  Goal: offering IdPs as a service on a cloud infrastructure!  This service permitted to take away greater part of the job from Federation participants.  All technological aspects are managed by GARR on behalf of the participating entity (including monitoring and updates);  Compliance to regulation and Federation policy is delegated to GARR;  The participating entity “only” has to manage users and passwords.

7. How we did this: the infrastructure 7 2 sites, 12 servers Instances, images & Data GlusterFS Openstack VM unique flavor Public IPs Service VMs  Nagios, Splunk, Collectd  DNS  Puppet Master IdP VMs go here Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

8.  Use a Puppet recipe to describe the features of the “IdP in the cloud” VM How we did this: automatization 8 => IDP in the Cloud Shibboleth IdP uApprove Custom login page Apache2 OpenLDAP phpLDAPadmin MySQL iptables rsyslog Nagios, Collectd probes Web interfaces openLDAP Base VM – 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 20 GB disk Ubuntu 12.04 + Puppet Agent Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

9. Key benefits of IdP in the cloud 9 Operation Focus on your users’ identity Focus on the services they want Organization Tutored pre & post provisioning Marginal OpEx, no CapEx Compliance with federation policies Technology Quick provisioning Continuous delivery Resiliency, openness, … Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

10. Andrea Biancini 10 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 Project results  With this approach the Identity Federation is diffusing into new communities:  Institutions in the biomedical research with small IT teams;  Cultural heritage institutions.  From request to Federated IdP in a few days (including administrative tasks) with no technical effort from requestor!  Possibility to manage all these systems with limited human resources (~10 IdP, < 0.5 FTE)

11. Extending this approach 11 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  We are extending this approach (used for IdP in the Cloud) from participants to Federation managers!  We plan to provide a Federation «appliance» (provisioned on a Cloud) with all the required technological components to implement a fully functional Federation.

12. Indentifying the key processes 12 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  As said, the main processes a Federation manager has to implement are:  Registering an entity (IdP or SP) in the Federation  Signing and distributing the Metadata.  Providing accessory services (like information pages or Discovery Service).  Among them, we have found that the more complex to be implemented is the first. In fact:  it requires human and technical validation;  it is the process that permits to create the trust;  entities are what the users see of the Federation!

13. Registering an entity in the Federation 13 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

14. Supporting the process 14 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  To support and standardize the process, we implemented a workflow for entity registration  This flow spans two integrated tools:  Resource Registry: to validate metadata information (and diffuse awareness);  Metadata Aggregator: to verify all the security aspects bound to certificates and to sign the metadata for the distribution to the Federation (and inter-federations).

15. The scenario 15 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

16. Technology to be developed 16 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  To provision the Federation «appliance» new Puppet recipes are being developed to automatize installation of the software components.  With these developments, the IdP in the cloud schema will be extended to permit the provisioning of a complete Federation as a service on a Cloud infrastructure.

17. Expected goals 17 Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  With this «appliance» we plan to standardize and support Federation operations.  By consuming this FaaS service, it will be possible to:  Start rapidly the operation of a new Federation, by almost eliminating the technological step in;  Leverage experiences and best practices to operate effectively a Federation even starting with little or no prior experience.

18. Andrea Biancini 18 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 ELCIRA: adopting Federations  ELCIRA will support the adoption of Identity Fedarations in Latin America.  But, as we have seen, deploy Federations is hard! 1.Technology needs to be installed and managed 2.Processes, steps, attribution of responsibility have to be implemented  ELCIRA will borrow GARR experience in automatizing components installation in a cloud and in operating a Federation.

19. Andrea Biancini 19 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 ELCIRA: supporting IdP installation  We will leverage GARR experience and solutions, developed during IdP in the Cloud project, to grow IdP diffusion within new or existing Federations.  This will permit NRENs to:  Guarantee compliance to qualitative standards for new IdPs in the Federation;  Give the opportunity to enter rapidly in production with a Federation entity!

20. Andrea Biancini 20 Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 ELCIRA: how to sustain new Federations?  GARR also provides support in sustaining the birth of new Federations by:  Sharing best practices for the key processes;  Sharing lesson learnt, dos and don’ts;  Providing technical solutions, as the “federation appliance” described earlier.

21. Thanks! 21 Q&A Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

22. Andrea Biancini IdP in the Cloud Showcase

23. 23 What IdP in the Cloud is The service goal: make the deployment and the management of the identity providers easy, by minimizing the activities and the complexity for home organizations. IdP as a Service (PaaS) IdM as a Service (SaaS) => IdP in the Cloud Benefits  Dedicated virtual appliance  Updates and customization  Federation policy compliancy  Cloud advantages First cloud service from GARR Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

24. 24 Getting an IdP in the cloud Request for an “IdP in the Cloud” IdP instantiation and configuration IdP delivery and user management Tutor the user in preparing the documents requested by GARR and the IDEM Federation The service creates a new IdP taking care of  Tools installation and configuration  Pre-production assessment  Federation policies Ready-to-use dedicated IdP VM to access federated services. Requestor tutored in managing users identities. Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014

25. 25 The request document Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  Is a very easy document to be produced by the requesting organization, with the following information (used to customize IdP and its Metadata):  Organization name  Organization internet domain  IdP name (or EntityID)  Description of the service  Organization public web site URL  Organization privacy policy page URL  IdP Informative web page URL (shown to users)  Organization logo images  Technical contact mailing list

26. 26 Provisioning the VM Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  Live demo!  A new configuration for the IdP will be installed on the Puppet agent (with the support of two scripts created ad-hoc).  Puppet will take care of all the rest!

27. 27 Puppet Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014  Open source framework able to automate repetitive system administration tasks.  Automatize the provisioning and configuration of IT servers.

28. 28 Basic principles of Puppet Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 Everything is described as a resource Puppet executes transitions among resource states (without a definite precedence) The final state represents the desired result

29. IdP in the cloud: user perspective 29 User interfaces: Custom IdP login page IdM interface Access log analysis tools Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014 We are evaluating Perun a tool that could replace phpldapadmin. More information here: http://perun.cesnet.cz.

30. That’s all folks! 30 Q&A Andrea Biancini Cancún - Mexico, 28.05.2014