The InCommon Technical Advisory Committee wants your help bringing a “good practice” approach to research and education (R&E) identity federation. Would you please join me on Tuesday, May 7, at 1:00 PM UTC, to plan how we might accomplish this? We will rough out a regular meeting schedule and set some immediate goals for the Federation Readiness Check working group then. (See below/attached for meeting details.)
A significant roadblock for new R&E community members is validating their identity provider (IdP) or service provider (SP) deployments. Current good federation practice involves an overwhelming variety of expectations, standards, entity categories, frameworks, profiles, and more. There exists no single, comprehensive resource for operational guidance and integration testing. What documentation or test resources exist are difficult to find even for experienced IAM professionals, are typically restricted to federation members, and are focused almost exclusively on IdPs. While the decentralized nature of R&E federation allows it to scale far beyond current commercial offerings, that same decentralization makes enacting meaningful change to IdP, SP, or federation operations seemingly impossible. A scorecard would be a powerful tool for change.
Matthew X. Economou, Vice President of Engineering Research Data and Communication Technologies P.O. Box 81 Garrett Park, MD 20896 USA Office: +1 (301) 760-7383 x813 Mobile: +1 (513) 445-2323 Email: meconomou@researchdata.us