Innovating in the Trenches: Enhancing AD FS and Azure for R&E

As early adopters, NREN partners like CANARIE have, and continue to invest considerably in evaluating and evolving technologies and standards in order to deliver enhanced federated identity solutions. In a commercial cloud... [ view full abstract ]

As early adopters, NREN partners like CANARIE have, and continue to invest considerably in evaluating and evolving technologies and standards in order to deliver enhanced federated identity solutions. In a commercial cloud dominated environment, vendors like Microsoft have had to radically reinvent themselves to stay competitive but not necessarily with the same guiding principles as our community. As part of this evolution and adoption of federation for the enterprise, their identity related offerings and tools have matured over time yet still have some shortcomings in key areas that R&E federations require.

CANARIE and the Swedish federation SWAMID have been working together on ways to bridge these gaps in a sustainable fashion. Not to replace existing solutions, but to augment and enable those who are operating AD FS as an IdP component in their federated identity solution. Rather than see this as a barrier, we saw it as an opportunity to capitalize on this tool's capability and expand the circle of trust among federated identities via the integration of broadly used technology like AD FS. 

Together CANARIE and SWAMID have assembled a solution set of native Windows tools and practices resulting in the ADFS Toolkit. The ADFS Toolkit helps AD FS administrators enhance their identity provider to more fully participate in a multi-lateral identity federation. Having another option to leverage pre-developed tools lowers the barrier significantly for sites normally not able to participate in identity federations, increasing the reach for our researchers tapping into existing infrastructure and growing our community.

This presentation will provide a walk-through of the ADFS Toolkit solution set and share our experiences operating in our production federations with participating AD FS sites. We will also provide insight to our experience in porting the ADFS Toolkit to the AzureAD ecosystem.