Identity and Trust Technologies for GÉANT Services
Collaboration across institutional borders is a recurring theme in the research and education community, and is one of the strengths of the R&E community. Therefore, providing infrastructure support for such collaborations is a very important aspect to advanced collaboration, as well as innovation.
Supporting Access with Enhanced Security
There is a careful balancing act between supporting collaboration for research activities whilst guaranteeing users' privacy and security. The NREN community and the GÉANT project have been amongst the greatest innovators in this area –demonstrated by the success of both eduGAIN and eduroam.
However, significant research is still needed to ensure that federated access is widely used and able to support emerging requirements, as well as to support NRENs' fundamental role in shaping the technologies that are used to implement federated access.
This research will focus on areas that, if not addressed, may hinder wide adoption of research and education Identity Federations, and consequently of eduGAIN, and the deployment of other GÉANT services.
The objectives of the research are:
- To advance research and development of technologies required to support distributed attribute management for authorisation and groups.
- To finalise the specifications of the Virtual Organisation Orthogonal Technology (VOOT) protocol.
- To ensure NRENs' involvement in the specification of identity and trust technologies in relevant standardisation bodies.
- To develop support tools for Identity Federations' operators and service providers to ensure that best practices are followed and inter-operability is supported.
- To research new identity technologies to support multi-factor authentication and non-web federated access.
