This task will enable e-infrastructure providers to meet scientific service providers and, with the support of key people known to these providers, explain how to implement SAML-based services. This may result in the gathering of new requirements and recommendations with regards to implementation and operational costs.
Targeted service providers to implement federated access will initially include, but not be limited to:
- The European biological, and biomedical user community represented by ELIXIR-ESFRI. Considering the importance of federated authentication and access for sensitive data management and processing, this community provides a practically driven environment to develop and disseminate training materials to streamline uptake of federated AAI services within the biomedical community. The training material developed for this community will be used to derive guidelines for other service providers in other communities as well, allowing those communities to evolve the initial material following their requirements and needs.
- The European Grid Infrastructure. EGI represents a very diverse ecosystem that needs flexible authentication and authorisation mechanisms to support both big and structured collaboration and the users of the long tail of science. The training activities will be focused on dedicated sessions during the EGI main events, which are attended by a large number of EGI resource provider representatives and disseminate the technical solutions and policies produced by the project, to raise awareness and trust in the framework designed by the AARC and to foster the integration of such technologies. For the user communities the target of the training will be to expand the use of standard-based attribute provider services to manage the authorisation, and to promote the use of federated identities to access EGI.
- The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. The WLCG community makes use of a production infrastructure spanning hundreds of resource providers, serving a community of more than 10,000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data, and the power to process it. The current architecture relies on X.509, which involves a number of drawbacks. It would be highly beneficial both for the users whose organisations are participating in eduGAIN and for the LHC experiments to enable identity federation for the WLCG services. An objective of this task is to enable significantly easier and more convenient access to a number of WLCG services using federated identities issued by eduGAIN Identity Providers.
- Another series of activities address the needs of Digital Humanities e-infrastructure communities. DARIAH has established an AAI solution and a proven record of resources that have been made available for federated access. However, on a European scale, many valuable humanities resources are not yet accessible via federations. This task will identify and address further resource providers and their training needs in order to extend the number of available resources.
Training material