Building Federated Identity Infrastructure

Aim of the event

This hands-on course was aimed at enabling NRENs and Campuses to setup Federated Identity Infrastructure in their own environment, and how to best pass that knowledge to their broader constituencies in their own language. The training materials are designed specifically with this in mind, and the final session aims to train the participants in some basic skills on technical training techniques.

Historically, IP-based authentication or shared accounts have been common mechanisms to access external resources. These approaches are simplistic and fail when staff, students and researchers are off-campus or need to access collaborative resources intended for an individual user.

Federated Identity Infrastructure allows campus authentication systems to integrate with a wide variety of services on campus, within your country and beyond.

Audience:
This EuroCAMP Training will be of most interest to:

  • Campus IT and Library Resource teams looking for solutions to effectively manage and scale their identity providing and consuming services;
  • NRENs exploring identity federation infrastructure for their country and wanting to promote identity federation to their connected campuses.

This hands-on training event focused on the tools and skills necessary to deploy identity infrastructure for your library, campus and country. Including:

  • How to safely and securely expose the identities of your user community within your organisation and beyond.
  • How to offer (as well as access) services and resources in a federated community.
  • How the development of hub & spoke federated identity infrastructure can scale from the campus to the country level.

The desired outcomes include:
  • Recognise the pros and cons of different federated infrastructure, such as mesh, hub & spoke and centralised login.
  • Practical skills in deploying federated identity and service provider services using simpleSAMLphp and Shibboleth.
  • Understanding of the operation hub & spoke identity infrastructure at the campus and country level.
  • Experience the benefits of federated identity infrastructure by accessing and sharing resources beyond your administrative domain.
  • Knowledge to set the direction for library, campus and country identity federation activities.

Required Equipment:
Attendees should bring a laptop with the following:

  • 1GB of free RAM.
  • Ethernet port.
  • A Virtual Machine tool (such as VirtualBox, VMware or Parallels).
  • Two (2) web browsers installed (such as Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome).
Contact the organisers if you have any questions regarding these requirements.


You can find the programme of the three day event at Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.