Select Internet2 Applications Now Accept Google IDs
Individuals can now use their Google IDs to log into four select Internet2 services. The Google Gateway will initially provide access to the InCommon Federation Manager, Internet2’s collaboration wiki, and two applications soon to be used by the Multifactor Authentication (MFA) Cohortium that is supported by Internet2’s Scalable Privacy Project from the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
“This provides our collaborators with one more way to easily and efficiently access these services,” said John Krienke, chief operating officer of Internet2’s InCommon. “With the rise in the number of campuses using Google identities, and the broad range of people interested in collaborating on our wiki, we thought this would be a good way to test the waters with a gateway.”
Internet2 contracted with Cirrus Identity to develop the gateway. Cirrus Identity provides a cloud-hosted, securely managed solution for leveraging social identities in a federation. InCommon is the U.S. identity federation serving higher education, research organizations, and their corporate partners.
The gateway can be used by delegated administrators to access the InCommon Federation Manager. Anything a delegated administrator does in the Federation Manager must be approved by the organization’s site administrator, which addresses any security concerns related to using a social identity for access. Likewise, the Internet2 wiki, and the wiki and registry used by the MFA group, have an emphasis on wide collaboration and ease of access, for which the Google Gateway is a good fit.
For more information, please see the wiki page at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/q4KZAg