Dear edu-ID friends,
We are pleased to present the November newsletter with a summary of our recent community event, updates on the handling of non-European mobile numbers, and information on registering incident reports.
1. Forum Day Review
On 17 November, Switch held its fifth Forum Day community event, which was also attended by the edu-ID team. The edu-ID community meeting was very well attended, with 50 people taking part. The slides are now available for download here: https://help.switch.ch/eduid/docs/about/events/
Here is a summary of the topics presented.
Rethinking edu-ID (slides 5-14)
We presented the current status of the rethinking process, which should ultimately lead to an updated strategy for edu-ID. We discussed important cornerstones of the strategy, such as the interaction between Entra ID, governmental e-ID and Switch edu-ID, the role of identity for our community, national and international cooperation, and questions of digital sovereignty.
OIDC support in edu-ID (slides 15-30)
OpenID Connect (OIDC) is becoming increasingly popular and will surpass SAML in the medium term. Improving OIDC support in edu-ID is therefore a high priority. Numerous improvements were implemented this autumn including full support of all specified edu-ID attributes, increased security and support for logout. We provided an outlook on the development of the classic attribute model, which will be able to cover significantly more use cases from mid-2026 onwards.
→ Call for action: we are looking for interested parties for the classic attribute model to validate our concept and test the implementation.
Group management (slides 31-37)
edu-ID group management is used for the differentiated administration of access to services. A new group management system is to replace existing systems and open up new applications. Use cases will be collected until the end of the year. Development of a new system will start in 2026.
→ Call for action: we are looking for further, preferably concrete use cases for a new group management system.
Service Stability (Slides 38-58)
We presented our approach to ensuring that edu-ID can withstand heavy loads such as the start of a semester. We put an updated Service Level Agreement up for discussion. The survey showed that the updated SLA is well received and that, in the event of incidents, a high level of transparency towards the community and the involvement of Switch management is desired.
→ Call for action: Please review our suggestions for availability (slide 52) and consequences in case of SLA breaches (slide 53) and let us know if you have any comments.
Student Validation Service (slides 59-68)
Student validation services are mostly used by companies to verify a person’s student status in order to grant a discount, for example. Switch has proposed that the validation service ‘InAcademia’, which is operated by the European higher education community and in which Switch is also involved, should be given preference over commercial services. This proposal was confirmed by those present, and we will apply it after consultation with the Advisory Board.
2. Blocking of non-european mobile numbers
Unfortunately, we have to block the registration of mobile numbers outside Europe for edu-ID users without an affiliation. The reason for this is that, due to the fee structure of numerous telecommunications providers, individuals can enrich themselves by sending SMS messages. As this abuse has increased in the past few months, we had to take action. From now on, newly registered mobile numbers must originate from a European number range if a user is not affiliated with a university. A user with affiliation can still register any mobile number, and mobile numbers already registered with edu-ID can continue to be used.
3. Incident Alerts from status.eduid.ch
In our last newsletter of 25 September, we announced that incident reports from status.eduid.ch would be automatically forwarded to the eduid-operations mailing list. We did not take into account that this would allow any list member to remove the forwarding, which is exactly what happened. We therefore ask all members of eduid-operations who would like to receive incident reports to re-subscribe at https://status.eduid.ch. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We hope you enjoyed these news. As always, if you have questions or feedback please contact us at eduid-support@switch.ch.