REFEDs: Research and Education Federations

REFEDs wish to address to need of existing and emerging e-identity federations
operating in the field of education and research in Europe, America and Asia to
collaborate on policy issues. Collaboration in this area is needed to learn from
each other, to align policy in order to facilitate inter-federation work, and to reach
outside the research and education community to enable federated access in the
larger world.

Institutions have been trying to develop reliable solutions to authenticate and authorise their users. The increasing mobility of users and the increasing number of international projects has resulted in the need for collaboration beyond institutional borders.

The number of federations is increasing and appears to be the way forward. New issues have arisen relating to the way different federations inter-operate with each other.

How can users from one federation be accepted by another federation? What are the technical challenges to allow multiple federations (confederations) to share a resource? To authenticate / authorise users? How does the trust model work? All these questions still need answering.

REFEDs aims to look at all these issues and to provide some guidelines for those interested in setting up a federation.

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