CTAB Call May 28, 2024
Attending
- Warren Anderson, LIGO
- Pål Axelsson, SUNET
- David Bantz, University of Alaska (chair)
- Tom Barton, Internet2, ex-officio
- Richard Frovarp, North Dakota State
- Mike Grady, Unicon
- Kyle Lewis, Research Data and Communication Technologies
- Johnny Lasker, Internet2
- Emily Eisbruch, Independent
- Albert Wu, Internet2
Regrets:
- Ercan Elibol, Florida Polytechnic University
- Matt Eisenberg, NIAID
- Gabor Eszes, Univ of Virginia (rep from CACTI)
- Scott Green, Eastern Washington University
- Christopher Keith, Brown University
- Ryan McDaniel, University of Alaska Anchorage
- Jon Miner, University of Wisc - Madison (vice chair)
- Andrew Scott, Internet2
- Rick Wagner, UCSD
- Kathy Wright, Clemson, (InCommon TAC rep to CTAB )
Kevin Morooney, Internet2 - Ann West, Internet2
Discussion
- Intellectual Property Reminder - All Internet2 activities are governed by the Internet2 Intellectual Property Framework.
- Public Content Notice - CTAB minutes are public documents. Please let the CTAB and note taker know if you plan to discuss something of a sensitive nature.
- Agenda Bash
Working Group Updates
- CACTI
- Discussion about InCommon Futures 2 and communication channels
- Dmitri Zagidulin, from the Digital Credential Consortium, has joined CACTI
- eduroam Advisory Council
- David reached out the Brett B, chair, as they are looking at Baseline Expectations for eduroam.
- Albert noted there will be some collaboration between eduroam Advisory Council and CTAB
- The eAC is just getting going on looking at baseline expectations
- InCommon TAC
- Federation Readiness Check WG: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SmoYwAKaLojdWOHQfQkDQwASokSKkDRF
- David will work with this working group effort
- David will work with this working group effort
- Deployment Guidance for REFEDS Entity Categories - consultation closed; WG addressing comments
- Many comments, doc has been updated
- TAC agreed to publish the updated version
- Albert has requested a DOI document ID
- TAC reactions to Futures2 five areas of work, will discuss further on an upcoming call
- SIRTFI
- nothing significant to report
- today is 2nd script-writing session with WG
- prepping for practice exercise for WG in June (this is for the WG)
- train them on how to run the exercise)
- will prep TTX call for participation to go out right after labor day weekend in September
Tribal Colleges and Universities Cyberinfrastructure Workshop updates
- This workshop was held in Tulsa May 14-16, 2024 https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/g5fy7zc/lp/2ab66db7-cd72-4493-9fa2-d1c79ec6ae2a
- Albert was one of the guests presenting about federated identity
- Goal: help colleges develop IT strategic plan and build up cyber capabilities
- Takeaways
- There are 38 total colleges 18? Colleges were In attendance
- Many have about 100 - 200 students
- Many are located in remote areas
- Often they have insufficient bandwidth
- IT teams are often between 1 and 5 staff for entire campus
- Colleges are closely tied to the tribal councils
- IT directors are closely connected to campus research initiatives
- That can be a plus
- SKC Salish Koonetai https://www.skc.edu/ joined InCommon and has tested successfully
- Turtle Mountain Community College is in talks with InCommon
- Several others expressed interest
- We hope to help these institutions whether they join InCommon or not
- NSF CC* grant was represented at the conference
- There is an effort to help the tribal colleges apply for CC* grant funds
- Will there be work for CTAB?
- Perhaps not immediately. To help very small schools it’s important to make joining as a consortium more natural.
- Eduroam has a notion of “support organization.” InCommon needs to develop this concept
- InCommon should likely promote the Service Provider side of the equation
Moving forward / Next steps on RAF2.0 Guidelines
- Kyle will work on spinning up a working group in June
- Soliciting internal and external participation
- Guidelines for participants on using RAF
- New edition of: TI.157.1 (REFEDS Assurance Framework Implementation Guidance for InCommon Participants, recommendations section)
- The focus is on updating the Assured Access doc based on RAF2.
- Kyle: There is a chicken and egg problem with RAF2
- Those who conform to InCommon Baseline Expectations are in compliance with RAF2
- If signaling RAF2 becomes part of Baseline Expectations, this will help the process of moving the community forward
- Currently NIH/NIAID Is not formally requiring RAF2
- No service of NIH is requiring identity assurance
- Much distributed authority in NIH
- Albert: we focus a lot on getting the IDP to do things, we don’t often ask the SP to explicitly declare what they need, this leads to inconsistent behavior
- Should we ask SP to specify identity proofing needs?
- Asking about identity proofing needs will force the SP to think about identity assurance as an item they should care about.
- This might create demand for IDPs to implement ??
- One strategy: InCommon could create expectation of federation operators to ask their SPs to specify identity proofing needs.
- Potential questions:
- what level of MFA do you need for your operations?
- What is needed for optimal experience for the end user?
- What do you absolutely require?
- What are the business requirements of your service?
- NIST requires AAL2
- NIH/NIAID accepts MFA profile
- LIGO experience: we would like assurance to be signaled, but we will step you up, using proxy
- It’s tricky to ask SPs what they need
- Note that MFA and RAF are different
- RAF does not have request mechanism from IDP at login, MFA does
- Europe tries to have IAP medium for every user
- There is step up
- Having a “killer service” helps
- Albert: InCommon is about to move site admin access to Federation Manager to rely entirely on federated access, single sign on.
- Could make a case to demand IAL2, but it is a tall order to ask all IDPs to have two people to assert IAL2 or IAL high.
- Thus starting by asking the IDP to ask its SPs probably makes sense.
- Albert: as part of operationalizing baseline expectations, we are requiring regular attestation of conformance with baseline expectations
- Step one is for an SP to articulate what they are looking for
- We provide a reasonable SP default setting, we can decide what attributes are required by default
- Start with positive gold star approach
- Put out communications stating “by meeting Baseline Expectations you can assert RAF2”
- See if that gets the ball rolling
- Identity assurance in allocation of Zoom accounts is an interesting case study
- Discussion to be continued in future calls: query approach, badging approach, get community input on this
Next CTAB Call: Tuesday, June 11, 2024