GNOMIS – the northern light TF-AACE, 24.11.2002 Ingrid Melve, UNINETT

Northern light What is happening in the Nordic countries regarding middleware Nordunet2 research initiative FEIDE and FEIDHE SwUPKI and SPOCP GNOMIS, the Greater Nordic Middleware Symposium

Learning networks

The Nordic area Sweden, Norway, Soumi/Finland, Denmark and Iceland Queen Margrete and the Kalmar union We are cold and high tech Universities are flooded with students Ubiquitous broadband Mobile users, cell phones are body parts Political will to do central projects (social democratic heritage) Democrat -> democratic

Nordunet2 Follow up on Nordunet which established the operational NORDUnet and put the Nordic countries on the network frontier Focal areas Distance education and lifelong learning Tele Medicine Digital libraries Infraservices

Infraservices is middleware Infraservices projects Directories Transcoding, mobile support GRID Virtual Reality support AA and GNOMIS Test networks

GNOMIS GNOMIS is a gathering of academic network professionals who develop and use middleware Finns have done large scale end user testing of PKI technology and smart cards Swedes have worked on server certificates and authorization Norwegians build user management systems integrated with authentication services

GNOMIS (2) Workshop November 2001 Projects, hard work, mailing list Follow-up meeting April 2002 Projects, more hard work and some play Co-operative project: SPOCP (se-no) Changing emphasis: less PKI for .no, more user admin for .fi Workshop November 2002 ???

GNOMIS (3) GNOMIS was a dream GNOMIS is a reality GNOMIS helps us Less work for me Better system for users Sharing results GNOMIS is a reality GNOMIS helps us Hash out problem space

Who participates in GNOMIS People with real problems Ongoing projects Operational services Pilots System administrators from universities National Research Networks People who build or configure solutions for others

FEIDE: common academic electronic ID in Norway Building a common electronic ID Standard person/user information Standard resource information Enable easy login facilities Building blocks User name/password in schema Legal issues wrangled once PKI, possibly support for smart cards Common authentication service Establish a common authorization service

FEIDHE/HSTYA Investigate possibilities for implementing a smart card based electronic identification Testing smart cards in applications User authentication Digital signatures Deployment steps recommended Make related modifications to the user administration Deploy services relying on PKI Distribute smart cards to the users

SwUPKI Swedish University PKI PKI used (mostly) for server certificates 5 participating universities (so far) Sample policies available, easy to join Operations and policy decisions are separated on top level Certification Authority

SPOCP test Simple Policy Control Project 5 Swedish universities, Sunet and Uninett Testing policy control server for authorization Centralized authorization Support for Access Control List descriptions

Summing up Nordic area is collaborating on solving middleware challenges Middleware makes networked life more complex Middleware is on its way Directories of information Software on servers and clients Policy and formal agreements Contact: gnomis@uninett.no