Frequently Asked Questions: Identity Federations
Identity Federations enable multiple identity and service provider institutions to collaborate with each other in a shared, secure and trusted manner. Here is a copyrighted animation from JISC that explains identity federations in detail.
Shibboleth/SAML Identity and Service Providers have been deployed in bilateral mode as well as large scale multi-institution collaborative federations. Here are some examples of collaborative identity federations based on the Shibboleth and SAML standard. If you would like your Shibboleth/SAML federation to be included in this list then please contact support@protectnetwork.org.
AAF, Australia
The Australian Access Federation (AAF) provides a framework and support infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications and collaboration within and between universities and research institutions in Australia and overseas. The AAF uses cutting edge technologies to provide a range of automatic identification services, which will allow authentication of people (researchers, teachers and students) and resources (servers, services, networks, instruments and data). It enables resource owners to identify and authorise a researcher to access online resources, such as computer facilities, data and other research infrastructure, at their home institution, at other Australian institutions, and around the world.
AAR, Germany
The AAR trust federation’s goal is to include German universities and research institution libraries. The federation will include as Shibboleth identity providers as well as library information service providers.
BeSTGRID, New Zealand
BeSTGRID started in 2006 as a Tertiary Education Commission Innovation and Development Fund Project 2006-2008, focused on how to make eResearch (What is eResearch?) work, to create a fully-functional eResearch ecosystem for New Zealand. BeSTGRID delivered mechanisms, methods and tools that facilitate collaboration on shared information, sharing of computational resources and online visualization of instruments and experiments.
CARSI, China
As part of CERFARI project, CERNETFed is launched for unified authentication and resource sharing in China’s education and research field and promoting resource sharing among various institutions through the use of middleware for inter-institutional unified authentication and authorization.
CRU, France
The CRU trust federation’s goal is to include 203 French universities and research institutions as Shibboleth identity providers along with a host of Shibboleth protected applications and services.
CSC, Finland
The HAKA trust federation includes six large Finnish universities and research institutions as Shibboleth identity providers along with a host of Shibboleth protected applications.
DFN, Germany
The DFN-AAI trust federation is a Germany wide federation sponsored by the German Research Network (DFN).
DK-AAI, Denmark
A number of Danish higher education institutions gathered together to form DK-AAI to help Danish students to excel in the education.
Fld-MPP, Canada
A number of Canadian higher education institutions gathered at York University in early February 2006 to see if there is an opportunity to collaborate in areas relating to identity and supporting systems. From this meeting, an initial high level roadmap was crafted.
GRNET, Greece
The Identification and Infrastructure Authority GRNET (Authentication Authorization Infrastructure – AAI) allows different agencies to cooperate in return for access rights for applications that have bi-institutional character. The infrastructure concerns the operation of a federation of trust between identity, namely institutions that maintain user accounts (Identity Providers – IdP) and providers (Service Providers – SP).
IDEM Federation, Italy
The IDEM federation originates from the GARR community and the Italian Academic and Research Network, includes Organizations, Identity Providers and Resource Providers, which comply with a common set of policies in order to ensure trust relations, thus facilitating user authentication and authorization procedures between Participants.
The goal of the federation is to include 85 Italian Universities and Research institutions as Identity Providers and resource providers offering online services to higher education and research. IDEM federation is based on the SAML standard and most participants in the federation use Shibboleth.
InCommon, USA
The InCommon federation, comprising of over 100+ universities and commercial organizations, creates and supports a common framework for trustworthy shared management of access to on-line resources in support of education and research in the United States. InCommon enables production-level end-user access to a wide variety of Shibboleth protected resources.
LEARN, Texas, USA
The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) is a cooperative effort of 34 institutions and organizations of higher education in Texas to provide high-speedl connectivity among their institutions as well as to research networks around the world in support of the higher education’s research, teaching, health care, and public service missions.
Leuven, Belgium
The LUDIT-AAI trust federation is a Shibboleth based Belgium wide federation that encompasses several university campuses and includes various identiy and service providers.
RedIRIS, Spain
In 1988, the National Plan for R&D started a horizontal special programme -IRIS- for the Interconnection of Computer Resources (Interconexión de los Recursos InformáticoS) of universities and research centres, and until the end of 1993 this programme was managed by Fundesco.
SWAMI, Sweden
The SWAMI federation is a nationwide wide federation of higher education institutions in Sweden and includes a growing number of commercial and higher-ed service providers and identity providers.
SWITCHaai, Switzerland
The SWITCHaai federation is focused on higher education in Switzerland and coordinated by SWITCH – The Swiss Education and Research Network. The federation is built on Shibboleth software and covers all Swiss universities as well as some universities of applied sciences. Meanwhile, more than 75% of all users in the Swiss higher education system have an AAI-enabled account. More than 10% of these users regularly access AAI-enabled resources, which steadily increase both in number and variety.
Texas Digital Library, Texas, USA
The Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a multi-university consortium dedicated to providing the digital infrastructure to support a fully online scholarly community for institutions of higher education in Texas. Through the establishment of shared policies and standards, forums for professional interaction, expertise in digital collections and preservation, and robust technical services, the TDL aims to increase the availability of the enormous intellectual capital produced throughout Texas universities.
UK Federation, United Kingdom
UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research The UK federation is a production Shibboleth federation for managing access to online resources for the Schools, Academic and Research sectors in the United Kingdom. The federation, which is growing rapidly, has 550+ member organizations and still growing rapidly.
University of Texas Systems, USA
The University of Texas System that includes nine large university campuses and six health institutions use Shibboleth as a common trust fabric for inter-institutional identity management. These institutions provide identities as well as services within the trust federation.
USMAI, Maryland, USA
The University of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions that include 16 libraries from 12 campuses and 2 affiliated Maryland higher education institutions have formed a Shibboleth based trust federation. The federation includes 16 Identity Providers and 3 Service Providers and more are being added each month.