An open discussion list for topics related to the eduGAIN interfederation service.

[Jozef Misutka <misutka AT ufal.mff.cuni.cz>]

Dear all,

putting my Service Provider (SP) admin hat on I would like to hear your opinions on the matter described below and whether it is an issue for other SPs as well.

Let's start with reading http://services.geant.net/edugain/About_eduGAIN/Pages/Home.aspx which can give the impression that SPs and IdPs inside eduGAIN should have "academic" [1] background:

"""
eduGAIN is a service developed within the GÉANT Project - a major collaboration between European national research and education network (NREN) organisations and the European Union.
"""

Entities are pushed to eduGAIN by national federations (NFs). Although many NFs have "Education and Research", "Academic" or "Science" in their name they have their own policies in accepting members.

Simply put, because "eduGAIN" does not have any requirements on the published entities in this respect users from e.g., private companies! can authenticate to SP. 

And this can be a problem for our (or any other) academic SP.

We want to be available "for all academics of the world" and we thought eduGAIN could help us and simplify the process. But because a lot of IdPs do not release any or valid attributes we do not know if the authenticated user is "academic" or not at the moment. The only way is to (regularly) go through http://edugain.org/technical/status.php, read all the Metadata Registration Practice Statement (MPRS) and find out which IdPs can join the particular federation. In case a NF allows private companies we would have to manually approve academic IdPs from that federation.

Some NFs put categories to published IdPs; however, it is not feasible to know all the NFs in detail for every SP.

Thank you for your input.

[1] We do not have a precise definition of "academic" but we know that private companies are not academic.

Kind regards,

____________________________

Jozef Misutka
LINDAT/CLARIN CTO
http://lindat.cz

https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/