45 people gathered for FIM4R’s 19th workshop collocated with Internet2’s Technology Exchange in Boston https://indico.cern.ch/event/1438628/. Many thanks to everyone who participated for the energy and the interactions – I find it highly encouraging that people were confident to (respectfully!) disagree with each other and get to the heart of some of the difficult challenges that we experience.
Some particularly memorable thoughts and questions from the room included…
- Universities requiring managed devices is a significant change and will impact AAI
- Do we open up the AARC BPA so that it’s usable by organizations/universities or will that dilute its relevance for research?
- There is a clear need for hosted AAI services for Research Communities (CiLogon is expanding and hiring new people – same for AAF)
- Change of entity ID/Scope at IdPs is a nightmare to deal with for Service Providers and proxies – there is no good solution at the moment.
- 50% of cyber security incidents are identity related – surely this can help us negotiate investment in IAM!
- SKA AAI learning from other research communities’ experiences about redundancy and reliability. Ideally we would provide guidance on how tokens should be used in advance, which would allow IAM service managers to estimate performance requirements, but there are many variables and it’s very hard to do!
- Adding proxies does not solve all problems… and can generate others
- We are not seeing adoption of community guidelines – are we focusing on the wrong things?
- Have we lost sight of the needs of service providers now that many research service providers are now operating proxies and also have to play the role of IdPs internally?
We kept the conversations flowing at Democracy Brewing after the day officially wrapped up, and I’m sure the following week brought many more fruitful discussions for all!
FIM4R will return for its 20th workshop on Mon March 31st 2025 in the afternoon as part of the TIIME unconference week 2025 (https://tiime-unconference.eu/) in Reading, UK. Registration is now open!
