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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.

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Federated access to Amazon Web Services

5 September 2014 at 12:08pm

Members of the AIM Group may be interested in a new guide recently published on the Amazon Web Service Group (https://community.ja.net/groups/amazon-web-services-aws/) that explains how to implement Shibboleth to get federated access to AWS.

As announced by Cal Racey on the Jisc-Shibboleth@jiscmail.ac.uk discussion list, he and colleagues at Newcastle University have been participating in Janet's Amazon cloud pilot and have created a guide on how to use Shibboleth to access the Amazon portal:

https://community.ja.net/groups/amazon-web-services-aws/article/guide-shibbolising-aws  

According to Cal: "it's relatively straightforward to do.  It also has the benefit that you can use amazon's native accounts/identities and shibboleth provided identities and roles at the same time.  Credit to my colleague  Chris Franks for figuring out the intricacies and writing the guide. 

Shibbolised access is particularly useful if you want to use shibboleth with many users (e.g. computing coursework) or leverage your own IDM for increased security." 

Thanks Cal and Chris for doing this work. If anyone is interested in this area, please head over to the AWS Group for more information.