Minutes

Attending: Matthew Brookover, Judith Bush, Janemarie Duh, Heather Flanagan, Eric Goodman, Mary McKee, Steven Premeau, Mark Rank, Keith Wessel

With (Also Starring): Jon Allen, David Bantz, Kim Milford, Kevin Morooney, Nicole Roy, David Walker, Ann West, Albert Wu, Steven Zoppi

Regrets: Matthew Economou

Status Updates / Q&A

• T&I and Ops Updates (Ann/Albert/Nicole/Shannon/Dave/Johnny)
  • Shannon is making progress on Baseline Expectations 2 tooling.
  • There will be a Federation Manager release next week to update Ruby.
  • Albert is updating the Baseline Expectations 2 wiki information. There will be targeted announcements every other week during the transition.
  • There will be a webinar in mid-April to discuss NIH's requirements. Albert has created wiki pages for this.
    • https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/BE/baseline-expectations-2
    • https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/federation/get-nih-ready
    • Mark has noticed that their customers are “mashing” BE2 and NIH requirements together. Appropriate distinctions will need to be made clear.
  • Zoom is updating certificates in metadata; there’s been some disruption. Albert is trying to help them.
• (email) International Update & SeamlessAccess Update
• (email) Working and liaison group updates - including 2021 plan items
  • Federation 2.0

HECVAT - adding in SAML integration information

• From the web site: "The HECVAT was created by the Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC) Shared Assessments Working Group, in collaboration with Internet2 and REN-ISAC."
• The HECVAT is revised yearly.
  • Currently looking at accessibility and privacy.
  • Sustainability is key, both for HE and vendor communities.
• Have triage tool to understand risk and to choose either the "lite" or "full" assessment tool.
• Mary: We’re looking for a community consensus based platform to communicate IAM requirements to the vendors (and to understand their compliance).
• Jon: We’re looking for partnerships for things like this (and InCommon is well-positioned for such a partnership).
• Next steps
  • Jon to draft a partnership agreement
  • Set up a meeting to discuss reengineering the IAM-related sections.
  • Mary McKee, Mark Rank, Steve Premeau, and Nicole Roy volunteered to help.

Continuing the conversation - What next with OIDC (in Federation), what advice do we offer (to Steering)? What do we need to know?

• What do we want to do with OIDC? How does it affect the federation? Should it affect?
• Currently, the nearly all use cases involve mapping to/from SAML to federate OIDC speakers.
• Albert: Our goal is to support collaboration and to help campuses participate. Perhaps it pertains more to Trusted Access Platform than to federation?
• OIDC conversation is different from proxy/translator conversation, but related in that the mappings to/from SAML generally involve translating proxies.
• There are two things here, OIDC (bilateral federation) and OIDCre (multilateral federation). The best way to deal with translation issues may not be OIDCre.
  • OIDC can be implemented now. OIDCre is not ready yet.

Next Meeting -  Thursday, April 8, 2021 

EMail Updates

International & SeamlessAccess Update

International Update
REFEDS

• The eduPersonAnalyticsID consultation remains open until April 5. An informal meeting was held March 24 to answer any open questions; 6 people (plus the moderator) attended. If you have comments, please add them to the consultation page: https://wiki.refeds.org/display/CON/Consultation%3A+eduPersonAnalyticsID
• As a reminder, REFEDS will hold a meeting on 1 April to go over the results of the 2020 Survey. This survey, which has happened annually for several years, is the best (and possibly only) way to see how academic federations are evolving over time. Registration is free: https://events.geant.org/e/refedssurvey.

IDPro

• IDPro is a professional organization for IAM practitioners. They’re designing a certification program that opes to offer a baseline measure for knowledge in the IAM space later this year. There aren’t many certifications like this in our space, so this is something to watch. More information is available here: https://idpro.org/cidpro/

SeamlessAccess Update
WAYF Entry Disambiguation Working Group

• The new WAYF disambiguation working group had their first meeting on 24 March. This group brings together representatives from libraries, federations, vendors, and publishers to learn more about the causes (and to discuss possible mitigations and preventions) for an IdP appearing multiple times in a WAYF list. The most common use case so far occurs when multiple departments within an institution join separate federations (e.g., the campus joining InCommon and the library joining OpenAthens). The group will be focus on three work streams: communications, short-term solutions, and long-term solutions.

Contract Language Working Group

• The Contract Language Working Group continues to focus on offering a template to libraries and publishers on how they can incorporate FIM requirements in their subscription contracts. The group expects to depend heavily on the new REFEDS entity categories (Anonymous Authorization and Pseudonymous Authorization) though there are concerns about registering new entitlement values as required by the entity categories. 

IdP Filtering/Signaling

• ON a more technical front, the focus for code development is on how to signal to a user which IdPs in a WAYF list are likely to work for a given SP. This functionality will be based on a concept presented at TNC several years ago by Niels van Dyke called “pixie dusting.” More information is available in a recent blog post: https://seamlessaccess.org/posts/2021-03-17-idpfiltering/

Heather Flanagan — Translator of Geek to Human
https://sphericalcowconsulting.com

Federation 2.0

Last week’s meeting went well and we worked on the Purpose of Academic Interfederation section in the introduction.