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

[Josh Howlett <Josh.Howlett AT jisc.ac.uk>]

Hi Jozef,

 

You raise a number of valid points. There is a vocal minority here who disagree with you, but I think the silent majority would agree with your characterisation of these issues and the need to address them, so that eduGAIN is better able to serve the research communities that it is primarily funded to support.

 

On the particular point of the Protect Network IdP; these kinds of open registration IdPs are clearly an anomaly. Even if its membership of the UK federation is consistent with UK and eduGAIN policy, it could be that we need to revisit these policies. I will discuss this internally.

 

Thanks for your input.

 

Josh.

 

Josh Howlett
Head, Trust & Identity

T +44 (0)1235 822 363
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Skype josh_howlett
Lumen House, Library Avenue, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, OX11 0SG

jisc.ac.uk

 

 

From: Jozef Misutka [mailto:misutka AT ufal.mff.cuni.cz]
Sent: 27 November 2014 08:35
To: edugain-discuss AT geant.net
Subject: [eduGAIN-discuss] eduGAIN and non "academic" IdPs

 

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/

 

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