Federated identities for research

With thousands of users from dozens of institutions accessing a variety of research infrastructure services and platforms through Compute Canada, managing access and tracking usage is a challenge. In our current system, we... [ view full abstract ]

With thousands of users from dozens of institutions accessing a variety of research infrastructure services and platforms through Compute Canada, managing access and tracking usage is a challenge. In our current system, we must manually vet identities of PIs, collaborators, and lab members who sign up for services by requesting affiliation from their institutions. Federated identities can help, allowing users to log in using existing institutional credentials and automatically providing Compute Canada with institutional metadata critical for user management. There are significant social and technical barriers to implementation of federated identities. If institutions adopt standards such as the Research and Scholarship attribute bundle, implementation of federated identities becomes much simpler and more powerful.