This is one of the questions we answer quite often – and the answer is “yes”. Of course we do observe initiatives within Switzerland (mainly eGovernment related) and abroad, and including international projects with common tasks and possible synergies. In addition to simply monitor what others do, we build relationships, exchange know-how, evaluate eID initiatives of other National research and education networks (NRENs), provide advice for groups who only yet start with federation projects, and SWITCH is active in international projects as GEANT.
Hereafter you find some examples of initiatives and projects, their goals and concepts, common activities (if any), and some ideas about common interests or possible synergies.
Month: March 2016
OpenID Connect meets SAML and Shibboleth
Will the up and coming OpenID Connect (OIDC) displace the established Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)? In some domains, it already has, thanks to the wide availability of implementations for many programming languages. It also offers an easy solution for delegating access to protected resources, something that is possible with SAML but more difficult to realise, and is a typical use case for mobile applications today. However, OIDC has no concept of a “federation”, i.e. a private group of entities who trust each other, and that is a big drawback to adoption in a federated context like research and education. In this article, we will look into a few initiatives that seek to bridge the gap between the two realms. Continue reading “OpenID Connect meets SAML and Shibboleth”