Access and Identity Management (AIM)

Last updated:

4 months 2 weeks ago

Group Manager

Members of the research and education community within the United Kingdom regularly make use of various types of online services, including web-based e-resources, wireless network access, and cloud-based applications. Many of these services require authentication of a user's identity, and many additionally require the release of attributes relating to that identity for authorisation purposes. Access and Identity management technologies and services aim to fulfil this need for robust authentication and authorisation technologies. Jisc either runs or is heavily involved with many major services offered to the UK R&E community in this space such as eduroam, the UK federation, Moonshot, and the Janet Certificate Service. This group exists for those interested in AIM and trust and identity services to discuss the latest developments, keep track of goings-on, and participate in discussions about what the community needs in this area and what Jisc should be offering. (Note that for eduroam, Moonshot, and the Janet Certificate Service specific discussions, these technologies have their own groups on this site). To learn more about Jisc's AIM services, you can see the slides and video of an overview given at Networkshop42.

Group administrators:

Rhys Smith

John Chapman

Simon Cooper

Recent members:

More standards, and could the Government help with a 'home for the homeless'?

John Chapman

7 March 2014 at 5:51pm

I've mentioned the monthly OIX meetings before and this week I managed to get to one to hear a very interesting presentation from Tim Bray - Google's outgoing Identity Evangelist.

Tim, and a number of other presenters highlighted the fact that OpenID Connect has been launched as a standard (http://openid.net/). I've been following OpenID Connect for a while, and now it is a standard I plan to dig into it a bit more to see if if we should support it within the UK federation. Your thoughts/comments are welcome. For more info see Tim's blog https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/03/01/OpenID-Connect.

He also mentioned that GSMA is looking to build a protocol on top of OpenIDConnect to come up with a standard way of authentication for mobile devices and the 4 UK mobile operators will shortly be launching pilot for technical, business and legal interoperability, with the Government Digital Service providing matched funding to see how they can take advantage of these new standards.

To demonstrate how easy it is to implement and use OpenID Connect, Tim's developed a demo (https://favcolor.net/account-login) that illustrates how you can choose your IdP via the account chooser (see www.accountchooser.com).

I also had an interesting chat with the Proposition Lead for the GDS Identity Assurance Programme about the possibility of using the Identity Providers on the GDS framework as IdPs for 'citizen scientists'. Again, this is an area I plan to revisit and would appreciate comments on whether any of your researchers have the need to authenticate citizens in this way.