Real Life Solution, Real Life Problems: A-Select, An Open Source Federated Identity Management Solution An Identity 1.0 story Maarten Koopmans SURFnet, OASIS Adoption forum 2006

High-quality Internet for higher education and research In the beginning… Well, the 90’s: a chip card for higher education. It failed miserably.

High-quality Internet for higher education and research … (2) Tests with mobile phones and e-banking (token based in NL). Piggybacking in

High-quality Internet for higher education and research Authentication middleware, 2002 Authentication middleware that could act as a switch between multiple authentication methods and added SSO as a bonus.

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select 1.0 Q First lesson: choose your project name carefully! Authentication selection. We’ll just call it A-Select “for now”.

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 1.0 features SSO Multiple authentication methods Simple “Cross” mode, full identity shared between domains 3 universities, users. They liked it. We invested.

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select in 2002

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select in 2002 (2)

High-quality Internet for higher education and research The marketing dilemma How do you get the other universities to use this? Encourage usage outside and within higher-ed

High-quality Internet for higher education and research The question then becomes: Why don’t you use it?

High-quality Internet for higher education and research : versions 1.1 – 1.3 Logging APIs and protocol improvements Better user database support More AuthSPs

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select in 2003

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2003: Build a community E-government chose A-Select, as did the public libraries System integrators More universities. Some users in NL

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2004: Strengthen the community e-government becomes DigiD, keep them on board Work together with libraries Add features: –fail over –more application integration components Open standards are becoming very important with Shibboleth and SAML, especially for higher education

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2004: A-Select diffusion Encourage usage via diffusion program: target 100,000 users by the end of Result: >> 200,000 users in higher ed and more are coming! Activities: Documentation Integration components On site support Project consultancy

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2005: Towards a Federation Release 1.4.1: integrating a lot of contributions from the community, massive clean-up of the codebase Release 1.4.2: Adding a simple yet flexible authorization engine and attribute acquisition (using, CGI, SOAP, LDAP)

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select in 2005

High-quality Internet for higher education and research A-Select in 2005

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2005: Digid more and more visible First cities are using Digid as an A-Select based IdP First tests with online tax forms with Digid as IdP

High-quality Internet for higher education and research 2006: Federation for real Release 1.5: adds SAML 1.1 with Shibboleth profiles. A-Select can act as IdP for Shib-protected resources. From 2007 onwards Digid mandatory for online tax forms Millions of users.

High-quality Internet for higher education and research Federation in 2006 usersidentitiescentral federation componentsresources (SAML) SAML

High-quality Internet for higher education and research Winding down Apache style licensed 98% Java based code > 5 authN Methods Healthy market and community millions of users Incremental growth has paid of: from authN to federation middleware Open source is a viable model for “NL as a company”

High-quality Internet for higher education and research What’s next 1.6 WS-* support SAML 2.0 support A-Select starter kit (with Linux, reverse proxy,...)

High-quality Internet for higher education and research Expanding internationally Open standards important for collaboration! Thank you, OASIS!

High-quality Internet for higher education and research Questions / discussion