NSF Workshop - Barriers to Federation for Researchers and VOs

Monday-Tuesday, April 18-19, 2016

Big Ten Conference Center
5440 Park Place
Rosemont, Illinois
(very near O'Hare Airport)

Internet2 has begun an ambitious program to tie together the community work accomplished over the last 15 years and enable campus and virtual organization deployment of secure, scalable, and privacy-enable identity and access management to support the research and education mission. TIER (Trust and Identity in Education and Research) is intended to bring together various open-source identity projects into one comprehensive package.

In gathering requirements for the TIER initiative, campus researchers and scientsts collaborating with national and international projects emerged as a key audience. While access to corporate cloud services is an understood value proposition for federated identity, the reality is problematic for individuals interacting with groups not necessarily associated with the institution. For example, a researcher may need to figure out how to connect with those operating the institution's identity infrastructure, which may be no easy task.

This  workshop will explore the roadblocks to deploying federated identity as a solution for access to distributed projects. More specifically, it will explore the researcher as he or she interacts on campus to enable this transaction. The workshop will allow key stakeholders on a campus to meet in person to identify the most common identity-related problem areas and operational constraints, and use those to inform the work on streamlining access for this important community.

The goals of this workshop include:

• foster discussion between the research virtual organizations (VO) and campus policy and technology stakeholders
• employ VO use cases to identify gaps
• leverage online voting as a mechanism to identify the most effective solutions
• extend findings to next steps for involved organizations.

The workshop will target an audience of federally funded research VOs, particularly those (such as GENI and LIGO initiatives) already using Internet2’s InCommon federated identity tools. Working with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, Internet2 will identify participants for invitation. The final report summarizing the discussion will include the findings such as the obstacles, current and possible future solutions, and involved communities identified at the meeting.