Tag: SWITCH edu-ID

First step towards passwordless login: Username first!

A lot of identity providers, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, ask the users for their username first, and then proceed to the password input in a follow-up step – if at all! The future world will be passwordless. So it won’t make sense to gather any password in the future.

The edu-ID login has caught up to get ready for a passwordless world. As of 9 August 2023, the edu-ID login window has changed so that users first need to enter their e-mail address. In a next step, they enter their password.

This is an important change to support Passkeys for the edu-ID login in the near future. Users having Passkeys enabled will enter their username and then log in with their Passkeys instead of their password. That is, the edu-ID login first needs to know the user in order to decide which login method is the user’s preferred one.

We are sure that edu-ID users will embrace this new process as most of them are already familiar with it from other identity providers.

 

Secrets of the edu-ID passwords

Since a few months now, edu-ID users  can secure their account with multi-factor authentication (Two-Step Login). However, currently 99.5% of all edu-ID accounts still rely exclusively on username and password authentication. It is unlikely to quickly change soon in the near future, despite the death of the password has been announced time and time again. The password remains the easiest, best known and – in many cases – the cheapest authentication solution. Therefore, the edu-ID team invests a lot of effort into assisting users to choose a strong password and to store it securely. Continue reading “Secrets of the edu-ID passwords”

Sending Users on the Right Path

This blog post describes the edu-ID Login Link composer that allows initiating certain processes that an edu-ID user goes through to login, register or complete his user attributes.

In a previous blog post we presented how AAI Service Provider (SP) administrators can customize the edu-ID registration and login pages individually for their service. However, an SP administrator can not only brand the edu-ID pages with a custom logo or custom text but he can also influence the process itself used when users register, login or when they complete their account data. Examples of such process modifications are:

  • To send a user automatically to a specific URL after registration or login
  • To make a user first provide a specific verified or unverified attribute (e.g. mobile number or home postal address) and then send him back to the service

Both of these example scenarios have been used for instance by the Swissbib service for several months. Swissbib users sometimes have to provide a verified mobile number and/or postal address before they get access to national license content, which – by agreement – should be only available to residents of Switzerland.

So, how can an AAI SP administrator customize the edu-ID processes to implement the above and more scenarios? All that is needed is to send the user on the right path, or rather to the right URL. For all those not wanting to get familiar with the technical details of how these URLs have to be composed to achieve a certain process change, we have created a useful tool that makes the URL generation very easy: The edu-ID Login Link Composer.

Screenshot edu-ID Login Link Composer
Screenshot of edu-ID Login Link Composer

The edu-ID Login Link Composer consists of a form with several inputs that are used to generate a link which triggers the requested behaviour. The user then just has to be sent  to the generated URL to start the process.

Try out the edu-ID Login Link Composer with your own AAI service.

Project approval for “Swiss edu-ID Deployment Step 1”

Back in August 2016, SWITCH and seven partners (EPFL, FHNW, UNIFR, UNIGE, UNIL, UNISG and ZHAW) applied for project funding through in the framework of the P2/P5 programme of swissuniversities. Regular readers of our blog might remember, that we wrote about the submission and the nature of the proposal in the blog post Project for Deployment Step 1 in 2017 submitted which you are encouraged to re-read.

We are delighted to share with you the good news that this project received green light from the “Comité de pilotage du programme CUS P-2” at their meeting on 5 December 2016. This is good news for SWITCH and the university community as well as their stakeholders, as it marks the first of four “deployment steps” to implement the Swiss edu-ID roadmap until 2020.

This week, we received the formal approval letter annexed with an assessment note and additional obligations, which mean some additional homework for SWITCH (clarifications, reporting and project management obligations, as well as accommodating a cut in overall spending). Another good news for our project partners: these obligations are not impacting our partners’ work packages nor do they affect the support they receive from SWITCH.

We are looking forward to start the process of entering the deployment phase of the Swiss edu-ID roadmap and rolling out the SWITCH edu-ID service until 2020.

From project to service – introducing the SWITCH edu-ID service

Autumn 2013. Big things start small. An interuniversity working group captures floating ideas around user-centric identities, puts those ideas into a roadmap and proposes a name for it: Swiss edu-ID. The resulting document becomes one cornerstone of the national strategy, approved by the Swiss University Conference in April 2014. But it also marks the beginning of SWITCH’s efforts to implement the proposed Swiss edu-ID roadmap. swissuniversities supports this collaborative effort of SWITCH and the Swiss universities including their libraries.

Autumn 2016. The pilot service Swiss edu-ID V1.0 is around for well over a year. It allowed us to gain first operational experience in numerous pilot projects and a much clearer picture of what is yet to come. We also learned that some services start to rely increasingly on the availability of Swiss edu-ID, while others care more for the latest feature. Time is ripe to give both a home.

This is why SWITCH starts to use a new, distinct branding for the operational service emerging from the Swiss edu-ID project. The new branding honors the roots by keeping “edu-ID” in its name, but it also shows its operational home, adheres to the service naming guidelines of SWITCH and receives proper legal protection. The user-centric identity management service of SWITCH will be called the SWITCH edu-ID service.

You might notice in the not so distant future, that a new service will pop in the service catalogue of SWITCH, or that the “edu-ID login window” will look slightly different. But one thing won’t change: in its heart, the SWITCH edu-ID still carries those ideas captured in autumn 2013 by an interuniversity working group.