5th Federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) Meeting

Federated identity management (FIM) in general and federated identity management for research communities (FIM4R) is an arrangement that can be made among multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identification data to obtain access to the secured resources of all organisations in the group. Specifically in the various research communities there is an increased interest in a common approach to FIM as there is obviously a large potential for synergies.

This workshop in the fivth in a series that started in summer 2011 to investigate Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) collaborations.

The workshop was hosted at the Paul Scherrer Institute (see the picture), located in Villigen, a municipality in the canton of Aargau (Switzerland). The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), is the largest research centre for natural and engineering sciences within Switzerland.

The first workshop was held at CERN in June 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/129364), the second at RAL in November 2011 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/157486) and the third at ISGC in February 2012 (https://indico.cern.ch/event/177418). The last workshop of this series has been held in Nymegen (http://www.clarin.eu/events/3501). Through these workshops, several research communities have converged on a common vision for FIM, enumerated a set of requirements and proposed a number of recommendations for ensuring a roadmap for the uptake of FIM is achieved. These points have been documented in a paper (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597) for which comments are welcome (https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1442597/comments).

One objective of this workshop was finalizing the work on a common FIM4R paper and to discuss related papers. Another major topic was to go from theory to practice and to present and discuss several FIM prototypes currently in development. Third, as the term ‘federated' already indicates, it will not be possible to find a ‘one size fits all'-solution to all requirements. In addition, there are, especially in the commercial sector, already various existing identity management tools, which would be interesting to connect. Therefore, solutions are thought of, which provide links between different systems. These developments are just in the beginning.

For further information please go to the meeting website:

http://indico.psi.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2230

DCH-RP project