[Tf-aai] Fwd: White Paper: Comparison of AAIs for Research

[Dieter Van Uytvanck]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: White Paper: Comparison of AAIs for Research
Resent-Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2016 13:37:23 +0200
Resent-From: federatedIdentity-members at cern.ch
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2016 13:36:55 +0200
From: Lukas Hämmerle <lukas.haemmerle at switch.ch>
Organization: SWITCH
To: federatedIdentity-members at cern.ch
<federatedIdentity-members at cern.ch>, refeds at lists.refeds.org

Dear colleagues

I would like to draw your attention to a white paper that might be of
interest to you. It's called:

#################################################################
GN4-1 White Paper: Comparison of Authentication and Authorisation
Infrastructures for Research
URL:
<https://wiki.edugain.org/File:Comparison-of-AAIs-for-Research_White-Paper_v1.0.pdf>
#################################################################


What does the white paper describe?
-----------------------------------
The document aims at providing a simple overview and comparison of the
available general-purpose authentication and authorisation
infrastructures and technologies in academia. The goal is to make it
easier for research communities and prospective users of these
infrastructures to learn the most basic aspects and characteristics
about them so that they can make use of one or several of them.


What was the motivation to write it?
------------------------------------
Obtaining a good overview of the different AAIs and technologies is
difficult for research communities, cloud providers or commercial
services that are about to decide which one to use for their own
purposes and how. This white paper provides such an overview via a fixed
set of questions that it provides first-hand answers for each AAI.


Whats the target audience?
--------------------------
Research communities, cloud providers and commercial services that would
like to inform themselves about the international general-purpose AAIs
they could use to offer their services or manage their research
community. But also the operators of one particular AAI because often
they also have limited knowledge about the technical mechanisms,
policies and needs of the other AAIs.


Who were the authors?
--------------------
The initial structure and the first content were created within the
GÉANT 4-1 project, mostly by the Enabling Users and the User Project
Liaison tasks. In a first phase, several task members then started to
collect information to describe the different AAIs on their own, without
external help. This showed us (all being federated identity management
experts) how hard it sometimes must be for research communities and
other potential users to gather accurate and up-to-date information
about AAIs.
In a second phase we invited experts from the described AAIs to correct
and complete the gathered information.


Comments and feedback are welcome.


Best Regards
Lukas Hämmerle

-- 
SWITCH
Lukas Hämmerle, Central Solutions
GÉANT Project Task Leader "Enabling Users"
Werdstrasse 2, P.O. Box, 8021 Zurich, Switzerland
phone +41 44 268 15 05, direct +41 44 268 15 64
lukas.haemmerle at switch.ch, http://www.switch.ch