Federations: Policy as well as Technology

The eduGAIN activity of the GN3 project is intended to link national Authentication and Authorisation (AA) Federations together, thus allowing users in one country to use their home authentication credentials to access resources and services in others. Despite the widespread use of the standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) there remain some technical challenges in enabling Service and Identity Providers to establish trusted communications. However issues of policy also need to be addressed, since organisations in different countries may be subject to different national rules on identification and behaviour.

A lightweight inter-federation policy is being developed to ensure that once countries' processes and expectations are recognised as approximately equivalent these can work together to support technical links between organisations in different countries.

Andrew Cormack - GN3 Symposium, Vienna, 8 September 2009
(http://www.terena.org/)