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

["Cheng, Jonathan [ITS]" <jonathan.cheng AT polyu.edu.hk>]

Hi Jinyong

 

Thank you very much for your questions and comments.

 

I am Jonathan Cheng from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.  I am the Team Lead of the HKAF Operator Team, with members from the JUCC office and five JUCC Full Member Institutions.

 

Our responses to your questions and comments are provided below in bolded green texts in larger font.  Please feel free to let us know if you have further questions or comments.

 

Cheers

Jonathan

 

 

From: 振溶[Jinyong Jo] [mailto:jinyong.jo AT gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, 2 October 2017 10:07 AM
To: edugain-discuss AT lists.geant.org
Cc: Brook Schofield <Brook.Schofield AT geant.org>
Subject: Re: [eduGAIN-discuss] Assessment of Hong Kong/HKAF for eduGAIN membership

 

Hello HKAF,

 

I think, the overall documents are well organized and the policies are clearly described.

 

My questions/comments:

 

1.     It seems that SAML WebSSO Technology Profile is not posted on the web site.

 

The HKAF SAML WebSSO Technology Profile has been uploaded and is now available on the website. (Thank you for reminding us.)

 

2.     Compelling "Federation members MUST collect and generate HKAF Core Attributes [1]" would act as a barrier when eduGAIN-federated IdPs try to access any relying parties held by HKAF's Associate Members. It will be better if HKAF relaxes the compulsory clause to the level of Attribute Bundle in REFEDS R&S Category [2].  

 

The HKAF Federation Policy mandates the Home Organizations to collect or generate the 7 Core Attributes for their End Users in their IdPs, in order to make it sufficient for the deployment of the majority of SPs in most of the cases. In fact, the 4 yellow-shaded attributes are addressing the required and optional data elements specified in the REFEDS R&S attribute bundle.

·      eduPersonAffiliation

·      eduPersonScopedAffiliation

·      eduPersonAssurance

·      eduPersonPrincipalName

·      cn (commonName)

·      displayName

·      mail

 

Furthermore, the HKAF Data Protection Profile defines the attribute processing principles that the deployment of SP must follow.  The second principle states that:

‘The SP Organization agrees and warrants for all of its SPs to minimize the Attributes requested from a Home Organization to those that are adequate, relevant and not excessive for enabling access to the service and, where a number of Attributes could be used to provide access to the service, use the least intrusive Attributes possible. [Data minimization]’

HKAF encourages members (Associate or Full) to adopt the ‘data minimization’ principle in the deployment of their SPs, from the consideration of data protection as well as making it easier for target IdPs to support. Basically, the SP organizations would not request for all available attributes of the End User just because the IdPs will provide them on user consent.

 

3.     Especially for eduPersonAssurance [3], how about letting SPs determine required level of LoA and control access by themselves, instead of enforcing the mandatory use of the attribute? 

 

The HKAF Federation Policy only asks Home Organizations to generate the eduPersonAssurance attribute for their End Users in the IdPs in accordance with the HKAF Identity Assurance Profile.  It is totally up to the SPs to determine the required Identity Assurance Level for access authorization.

 

4.     I wonder what the exact meaning of the 'sponsored' in the sentence "The associated membership of an organization must be sponsored by a full member [4]" and how HKAF can verify the eligibility of the sponsored membership. It seems likely that foreign SPs will be federated very limitedly depending on the meaning.

 

It means that the application of HKAF Associate membership by the organization must be supported by a HKAF Full Member organization, but not in the sense of finance.  A typical scenario is that a HKAF Full Member institution sponsors the HKAF Associate membership application of another organization for registering and connecting SPs to HKAF for providing services to support R&E of the institution.  However, this does not affect the access to SPs already registered with other federations.

 

5.     I just want to know target applications/services HKAF pursues. The strict policy and profiles are fully understandable If the federated use of supercomputers or hpc resources is an ultimate goal. However, i would like HKAF to slightly mitigate the compelling stuff to accept wide variety of SPs.

 

The primary sector of applications /services which HKAF targets to pursue is Research and Education. The approach we have adopted in formulating our policy framework is to strike a balance between ‘making it very easy for organizations to register IdPs and SPs for connecting to the federation’ and ‘providing confidence and peace of mind to our potential members and our peer international federations on the level of security and data protection practices adopted by HKAF and its members’.  We would like End Users affiliated with HKAF members to be regarded by all federations as first-class trust-worthy netizens. Furthermore, SPs registered with HKAF can be trusted by Home Organizations all over the world.  We will continuously monitor the development of the global federation ecosystem and make necessary adjustment to our policy framework in the future.

 

[1] Hong Kong Access Federation (HKAF) Federation Policy, p. 15

[2] REFEDS, https://refeds.org/category/research-and-scholarship

[3] Hong Kong Access Federation (HKAF) Attribute Profile, p. 6

[4] Hong Kong Access Federation (HKAF) Eligibility Policy, p. 5

 

Cheers,

Jinyong JO,

KAFE/KISTI

 

2017-09-28 23:28 GMT+09:00 Brook Schofield <brook.schofield AT geant.org>:

All,

I present to you the application of:
 * Hong Kong/HKAF

 

who has Signed the eduGAIN Declaration, has a policy based on the federation policy template that covers all the prescribed areas with extensions into useful areas, is self declaring their federation as a production service and is wanting to join the global R&E federated environment. To provide guidance on your assessment I’ve performed a summary (attached) of their policy.

You can find more detailed information about the federation under "eduGAIN Candidates” at
    https://technical.edugain.org/status.php

which contains links to their policy and MRPS (which doesn’t follow the MRPS template but does address Home Organisation, IdP and SP registration and production of @scope).

This application is from an organisation that is closely aligned with the GÉANT community via their participation in the APAN and Asi@Connect/TEIN communities. The development of this federation has been supported by the Australian Access Federation (AAF). They are also the eduroam .hk roaming operator.

So I ask the following federations to specifically review the submission by HKAF:

 * France / FÉR

 * Japan/GakuNin

 * Korea/KAFE

 * Latvia / LAIFE

 * Lithuania / LITNET FEDI

 

All eduGAIN members can (and should) provide feedback on this.

If you have any questions please contact the HKAF team that are subscribed to this mailing list.

 

This announcement of the assessment of a federation is new to the eduGAIN-Discuss mailing list. It is hoped that this platform will allow the free flow of information between commenters and the HKAF team (which wasn’t possible when this discussion was only on the eduGAIN Steering Group (eSG) mailing list. Formal components of the membership process will continue on the eSG list. Hopefully this will be an improvement to the membership process. 

 

My intention is to call a vote to accept Hong Kong/HKAF as a member after I’ve received confirmation from at least 3 of the specific federations that this policy is inline with their expectations.

Thanks,

 

Brook Schofield
eduGAIN Steering Group Chair
GÉANT

M: +31651553991 
Skype: brookschofield

www.polyu.edu.hk/80anniversary

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