Real Life Solution Real Life Problems ASelect An

Real Life Solution, Real Life Problems: A-Select, An Open Source Federated Identity Management Solution An Identity 1. 0 story Maarten Koopmans SURFnet, maarten. koopmans@surfnet. nl OASIS Adoption forum 2006

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 2001 -2. 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 4 -2002 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, 30. 000 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

2002 -3: versions 1. 1 – 1. 3 • • Logging APIs and protocol improvements Better user database support More Auth. SPs 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 100. 000 users in NL High-quality Internet for higher education and research

2004: Strengthen the community • e-government becomes Digi. D, 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 2006. 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

2005: Digid more and more visible First cities are using Digid as an A-Select based Id. P First tests with online tax forms with Digid as Id. P 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 Id. P 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 SAML (SAML) users identities central federation components High-quality Internet for higher education and research resources

Winding down • • • Apache style licensed 98% Java based code > 5 auth. N Methods Healthy market and community millions of users Incremental growth has paid of: from auth. N 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