Google Gateway

Google Gateway

InCommon Operations runs a Google Gateway for internal use. Currently the Gateway is integrated with the following Internet2 services:

• InCommon Federation Manager
• Collaboration Wiki Spaces at Internet2 (commonly called the “Spaces Wiki”)
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cohortium Registry
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cohortium Wiki

Over time, other Internet2 services will be integrated with the Google Gateway.

See the Google Gateway FAQ for more information.

Federation Manager

The InCommon Federation Manager uses the Google Gateway to authenticate a class of users called Delegated Administrators. The term Delegated Administration refers to the ability of a Site Administrator (who is a privileged user) to delegate responsibility for administering SP metadata to another administrator called a Delegated Administrator. A Delegated Administrator (DA) logs into the Federation Manager (FM) with a federated password, that is, the DA must have an account on an InCommon IdP. (InCommon Operations does not issue passwords to DAs.) If a site wishes to use the Delegated Administration feature of the FM, that site must deploy an IdP or use the Google Gateway.

In the eyes of a Delegated Administrator, the Google Gateway is just another IdP. Specifically, a DA sees an IdP called “Google Sign In” on the FM’s discovery interface. If the DA chooses to sign in with Google, the FM redirects the DA’s browser to the Google IdP via the Google Gateway.

Gateway Attributes

The current version of the Google Gateway asserts the following attributes:

• eduPersonPrincipalName
• mail
• givenName
• sn (surName)

The mail, givenName, and sn attributes always pass through the Gateway as-is. The value of the eduPersonPrincipalName (ePPN) attribute is computed as shown in the following example.

Example. Suppose the Google IdP asserts the following email address:

The Gateway is configured to compute the corresponding ePPN as follows:

Note: Google email addresses do not always end in “@gmail.com”. In fact, a Google email address can be virtually anything since Google Apps accounts are based on arbitrary DNS domains.

On the other hand, the Gateway asserts an ePPN with a fixed scope (“@gateway.incommon.org”). No configuration at the SP is necessary since by default the SP performs scoped attribute checking based on a fixed set of <shibmd:Scope> elements in Gateway metadata. In fact, there is one such <shibmd:Scope> element in Gateway metadata, namely:

and so the ePPN shown above will be accepted by the SP by default.