1. Supporting further and higher education Authentication & Authorisation for JISC and UK e-Science Alan Robiette, JISC Development Group

2. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS2 Context Universities and colleges engage to varying degrees in Teaching and learning (e-Learning) Research (e-Science) Community links (business, culture, sport including e-Business) Information management of their own (e-Administration, e-Libraries) How far can all be supported by common services?

3. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS3 Core middleware Mostly about identifying and describing people and resources and how they interrelate The people part is a fairly well understood problem Staff, students, other categories Faculties, departments, rôles within these Groups of various kinds

4. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS4 But the resources? Range of scenarios with widely varying characteristics Internal resources (very diverse) Institution to institution (shared courses, research collaborations) Institution to national-scale service (examples include JISC content, Grid) Institution to other body (ad hoc business or similar relationship) The wider Internet

5. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS5 Internal resources Many resources Every kind of use condition Institutions have to take their own internal management decisions Possible advisory rôles for JISC e.g. Recommended approaches to “single sign-on” Recommendations on interfacing to national middleware infrastructure

6. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS6 Institution to institution Interestingly the most likely use conditions may be by named group e.g. Research team, or student class Attribute-based frameworks like Akenti or Permis well suited to this Shibboleth also deals with this case, but attribute namespaces are a problem

7. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS7 The national level Access management for JISC content Authorisation by site (mostly) Currently Athens – but where next? The Grid: quite different (for now) Authentication requires certificates Authorisation mainly by VO; many competing solutions Attribute-based frameworks could provide the link (see later)

8. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS8 The wider world Few middleware standards at present So current solutions are more or less bound to be ad hoc Will we get standards emerging in time, e.g. via web services? SAML, XACML, WS-Security, eBXML, XrML/ODRL, etc. Maybe but it could take a long time

9. 28 March 2003Akenti Workshop, MIMAS9 What next? How far could the scope of the attribute certificate approach be extended? Some questions: Creation and management of attribute certs on a large scale? Interfaces to local authentication schemes? Interfaces to service points (including commercial service providers) Performance?

10. Supporting further and higher education Questions …