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Abstract

Identity is a strategic piece in any kind of organization, as it is the key to gain access to institutional services and information. Proper management of authentication and authorisation mechanisms is being transformed into a more and more relevant (and often complicated) task for academic institutions. This fact is brought forward when we take into account the constant change of the user base induced by their open nature.

Authentication and authorisation infrastructures (AAI) and, above all, the schemes that allow their integration through federation mechanisms, are a key component of academic and administrative institutional ICT. This is specially relevant for the achievement of a fundamental target in European academic environment, the implementation of the Bologna Process.

The paper will present the selected technological options, based on open standards and mostly developed by international cooperation inside the TERENA and GÉANT2 task forces, like SAML and SCHAC. The paper will also present the architecture for the federation common elements, which has been designed with the main aim of guaranteeing the scalability and continuity of the federation.

The working group formed for the task has produced both a document and reference implementations for the main elements of the Federation. The works on metadata should be highlighted, like the implementation of a web based metadata management system or the metadata based WAYF service.

About the speaker

Victoriano Giralt has been engaged in system administration and Internet related work for over 20 years. He is systems manager at the University of Malaga and is involved in middleware activities at regional, national and international levels. He is a member of ECAM (European Committee for Academic Middleware), directories and schemas activity leader in the TERENA Task Force on European Middleware Coordination and Collaboration (tf-emc2), and is involved in several efforts for defining person schemas. Victoriano has participated in the AAF working group for the definition of the Australian auEduPerson schema.