Mark writes:

Had a couple of comments asking if the Institutional support ITT mentioned below ( Calling third parties ) means a change in the JISC position regarding the access management alternatives faced by institutions. Actually, far from it. Once the mechanisms are in place it will actually increase choice. At the moment a well resourced College is in a position to choose any of the three access management options, but a less resourced one may well find their theoretical choice narrowed down to one, in practice. We don’t want cost or sheer size (and therefore resourcing) of an institution to be the single determining factor in how they choose to solve access management issues, the whole issue is just so much more complicated than that. So the ITT is designed to give choice back to the smaller institutions most at risk of currently not having access to all the options. The regret is that the £225000 available for funding the support can only go so far.

And in my personal experience, once institutions have cost removed from an issue, they tend to choose very wisely indeed….

Mark writes:

JISC has just issued an ITT for third parties experienced in access management to bid to provide support to institutions who want to deploy a IdP. You might say that such support is already there, and to a degree much of it is. Particulary if you are an Institution employing an IT staff with the correct skill set, have an organised directory service, a significant subscription to JISC Collections resources and the strategic ambition to move forward on access management. However, and it is a big HOWEVER, its clear that there are enough institutions who can use the business case toolkit to determine that they want access management (and I mean the 100% proof type, not devolved outsourcing to a delegated authority), but who have also determined that its currently financially / technically out of reach. It is that group of institutions, which the successfull respondent to the ITT will be working with. The time will come for such institutions to submit applications for the help that the project will provide, but for the present - if you are a third party provider of access management support, with a desire to spend long hours setting up IdPs in grateful institutions all over the country - we want YOUR interest. And remember we encourage questions……

Representatives from the UK Access Management Federation and JISC Outreach team attended the first ever International federation peering workshop in Prague last month to discuss the main drivers and possible use cases for inter-federation operability. Many countries were represented at the meeting, mostly from Europe but also from Australia, the United States, Japan and Brazil. There was very lively discussion at the workshop about various issues including federation models, levels of assurance, the use of attributes and privacy.

Different federation models and their definitions were discussed including confederation (agreement among several federations), peering (agreement between two federations) and leverage (membership of smaller federation and also an overarching federation). In particular we talked about how these models might work across different sectors eg. public sector and government, business and social and across international borders.

Levels of assurance and attributes are important issues to consider for inter-federation operability and some policy work on this is being carried out by JISC on a study looking at commonalities between national access management federation policies. It is important all members of federations have trust in the federation they are have a peering or confederation agreement with, particularly with regards to issues relating to the exchange of information about users and resources eg. levels of assurance for the protection of user’s privacy. Agreement on the levels of assurance and agreeing to a standard set of attributes will be important to the operability between federations.

Participants were asked to identify possible use cases for inter-federation peering or confederation, particularly where this would aid collaborative work and sharing of resources available at other institutions.

OpenID also seemed to be a hot topic, and there is currently some work being done on interoperability between SAML-based federations and OpenID.