It was fantastic to see many new people at our FIM Interest Group Session at the Virtual RDA Plenary 17 on the 21st of April 2021!
We started with an introduction to Federated Identity Management from Dave Kelsey (STFC-RAL) and a discussion on assurance led by Hannah Short (CERN). Many attendees participated in the live quiz that aimed to gauge attitudes towards assurance (i.e. the degree of confidence that a digital identity belongs to the expected entity) in identity federation scenarios. Whilst many were willing to rely on assurance asserted by trusted identity providers there was still some hesitation and much work is needed. We then moved on to hear about best practices for protecting research communities, and got to know the AARC Guidelines presented by Nicolas Liampotis (GRNET). We concluded with a presentation from Christos Kanellopoulos (GÉANT) on the plans for Federated Identity Management in the European Open Science Cloud.
Slides are available at the following links:
- Introduction and Assurance: https://zenodo.org/record/4707942#.YIEjly0RoUE
- AARC Guidelines: https://zenodo.org/record/4720955#.YIbVkH0zYaM
So what’s next for Assurance? Given that the propagation of assurance information is becoming necessary for certain research use cases, it’s important for us as Research Communities to express our joint requirements to the wider Federated Identity Management stakeholder groups. Over the coming months we will begin work on a short white paper and will be seeking input from the FIM4R Community.