TERENA has signed a new agreement to continue the TERENA Certificate Service (TCS) through Comodo CA Ltd for another year, through June 2013. The biggest change in the renewed agreement is that from 1 July 2012, the restriction that TCS certificates may not be used to secure online financial transactions will be lifted. This means TCS server certificates may be used for websites that handle credit card payments, for example.

On 27 January 2012, research networking experts from across Europe assembled in a small workshop in Rome to provide feedback on plans to create a National Research and Education Network (NREN) in Albania. The event was organised jointly by CASPUR (the Italian Inter-University Consortium for the Application of Supercomputing for Universities and Research) and TERENA's Networking Development Support activity, which receives EU funding through the GN3 (GÉANT) project.

The eleventh annual TERENA Compendium of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Europe has been released. The 2011 edition assembles data from more than 50 organisations, mostly from Europe, but also from other regions. The online version of the Compendium provides basic information about the organisation, staffing, finances, user base, capacity, services and developments of these organisations. The printed publication, in addition, analyses trends over time.

The 2011 edition, the third to be published as part of the GN3 (GÉANT) project, has been enhanced with input from activity leaders working in that project. New for this year is that, in most cases, all GÉANT partner NRENs are grouped together.

The Developers’ EuroCAMP held in Utrecht on 13-14 December 2011 at the SURFnet headquarters, focused on problems and resolutions in group management and federated services. Building on results from the previous Developers’ EuroCAMP, which was held in Vienna in 2010, this discussion-oriented and participant-driven meeting gathered a mixed audience of professionals from research infrastructures and middleware experts.

Technology specialists, campus administrators and middleware and application developers from thirteen countries (Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom) began the meeting by collaboratively building the programme for the rest of the event based on their specific areas of knowledge or problems needing the most attention. Of keen interest were topics such as inhibitors to federating a service, application federation readiness, identity assurance, and attribute aggregation and account linking.

TERENA has been awarded a contract by the European Commission to carry out a study into AAA (authentication, authorisation and accounting) platforms and services for scientific data/information resources. This is the result of TERENA’s first-ever response to an EC call for tender. TERENA will act as the leader of the study, sharing the work with three other partners: LIBER (the association of European research libraries), the Systems and Network Engineering research group at the University of Amsterdam, and the Library of the University of Debrecen (Hungary).

The study will carry out a feasibility and impact analysis for European legal and policy initiatives that aim at unified and interoperable AAA platforms and services. The key objective of this work is to enable inter-operability among existing e-Infrastructures as much as possible to offer high-quality services for researchers, funding agencies and the public at large in a cost effective manner.

A statement of compliance with technical and organisational standards for eduroam roaming operators (ROs) was signed and finalised by five key regions in December 2011. Representatives of the national ROs in Australia, Canada, Japan and the United States as well as the confederation of national ROs in Europe signed the eduroam Compliance Statement, which was composed by the Global eduroam Governance Committee (GeGC) earlier in the year.

The compliance statement is significant because it opens up the opportunity for the eduroam roaming Internet access service to expand further while maintaining a high and consistent standard of service that ensures connection for all users anywhere in the world. The compliance statement is the first formal outline of standards for the global eduroam service. Authorisation by the GeGC to operate the eduroam service is now dependent upon compliance with these standards.

NREN and Campus representatives from ten countries learned how to implement federated identity infrastructure on their own campuses during the EuroCAMP (European Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning) training event, from 28 November to 1 December 2011. The training, themed “Building Federated Identity Infrastructure”, offered a newly revised and unified method. This was the second time that a EuroCAMP training has been organised by TERENA in collaboration with the GN3 (GÉANT) project – specifically the Development Support and the eduGAIN activities. The previous EuroCAMP was held in the summer of 2011 in Istanbul.

The countries represented at the event, which took place in the TERENA Secretariat offices in Amsterdam, were Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, the Russian Federation and Slovakia.

The GNU Gatekeeper (GnuGK) is now fully IPv6 compliant. The corresponding code and documentation are freely available. These are the results of a project that was organised by TERENA and co-financed by seven national research and education network (NREN) organisations.

GnuGK is a full-featured H.323 gatekeeper, available freely under general public license. It forms the basis for a free IP telephony (VoIP) or video conferencing system. A proposal was made in mid-August 2011 by CESNET (Czech Republic) to make GnuGK IPv6 compliant. CESNET contacted TERENA to investigate whether there was sufficient interest within the community to share the development cost.

Registration is open until Friday 2 November for a Developers' EuroCAMP on 13-14 December 2011. The event targets developers and implementers in organisations and campuses who are focused on supporting research infrastructure and are looking for solutions to manage identity and group collaboration issues. Areas covered at the event will include OpenID Connect, group management APIs (application programming interfaces) and their implementation, virtual organisation solutions and their integration into existing products, and practical 2-factor authentication.

The event is being organised by TERENA and SURFnet and will be held at the SURFnet offices in Utrecht, Netherlands.

TF-Media will continue with a new focus from January 2012. A new full-version of the name reflects that change: TF-Media will be short for the Task Force on Applied Media in Teaching and Learning, rather than the current Task Force on Media Management and Distribution. The new terms of reference for TF-Media were approved by the TERENA Technical Committee on 24 November, giving the task force another two-year mandate.

The decision to change focus was one outcome of the fifth TF-Media meeting, which was held with a task force workshop on 26-28 October 2011 in Porto, Portugal. The event was hosted by ISEP (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto) and the Portuguese national research and education networking organisation FCCN.