APAN WGs Highlights

APAN IAM-TF - Identity Federations

Chair: Terry Smith [ t.smith@aaf.edu.au ]

Co-Chair: Toby Chan [ toby.chan@polyu.edu.hk ]

Co-Chair: William Wan [ wanl@cernet.com ]

Mailing List: iam@apan.net

Over the past five years the Identity and Access Management (IAM) taskforce has been working closely with our community to improve access to research activities, research data and scholarly articles, and to enhance collaboration across the Asia Pacific region. This has been successfully achieved through the deployment of Identity Federations that connect globally to all other regions. If you’ve seen or used this button, you're logging in via a federation.

The IAM taskforce’s focus has been to support the development and establishment of research and education identity federations and federated services by national NRENs and Federation operators. They in turn work with local Universities and Research Institutions to provide a seamless authentication experience for researchers and students. Researchers use the username, password and second factor authentication provided by their home organization to potentially login to thousands of research tools, publishers and other services (Service Providers) across the globe.

One username, One Password to access them all!

Service Providers win! They are no longer burdened with setting up and maintaining their user’s accounts, changing passwords, verifying the authenticity of their users or having to worry about protecting the users credentials and to some extent their personally identifiable information (PII).

The task force has been instrumental in assisting in the deployment and growth federations in Sri Lanka (LIAF), India (INFED), Pakistan (PKIFED), Malaysia (SIFULAN), Bangladesh (TigerFed), Thailand (ThaiIDF), China (CARSI and CST Cloud Fed), Indonesia (Federasi.ID) and working with the more established federations from Hong Kong (HKAF), Japan (GakuNin), New Zealand (Tuakiri), Singapore (SGAF), South Korea (KAFE) and Australia (AAF) to ensure the continued success of identity federations across the region. 

If you're not listed above, the taskforce would love to help your economy to “get federated” and enjoy the benefits. If you operate a service that you want to share beyond your institutions boundaries, federation is for you!

If you want to know more, reach out to your local NREN or Federation operator, they are listed on the REFEDS (the Research and Education FEDerations group) federation page (https://refeds.org/federations), or if your federation is not shown you can contact or join the IAM Task Force (http://mail.apan.net/mailman/listinfo/tf-iam_apan.net) or find us in the APAN slack #iam-tf.

In next TF-IAM article we will investigate the impact the IAM Task Force has had on eduroam, the global wireless federation that provides users (students, researchers, staff and faculty) in the research and education sector with mobility between participating institutions’ wireless infrastructures, while removing the institutional administration burden of managing guest network access.