Speakers
Description
The identity interfederation eduGAIN, or federation of federations, makes it possible for researchers, teachers and students to log into services around the world with their home organisation credentials. eduGAIN is currently built on SAML, a technology that has served the research and education community well for many years. Now, SAML is considered a legacy technology, and development has ceased. At the same time, OpenID Connect 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 are the current industry standards, but they lack a scalable way to establish trust.
The OpenID Federation specification defines an architecture for establishing trust at Internet scale for OpenID Connect 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and ideally for any web-based authentication and authorisation protocol, including verifiable credentials and identity wallets.
As part of the GN5-2 project, the eduGAIN service is currently running a pilot to test how OpenID Federation can be used as the future trust technology for eduGAIN, alongside the existing SAML infrastructure. The pilot started in July 2025 and will run for 12 months. The pilot infrastructure is also a test bed for OpenID Federation enabled Identity Providers, Relying Parties, Trust Anchor software that are currently being developed and refined by the community.
During this talk we’ll introduce the new federation technology OpenID Federation and present the preliminary results of the eduGAIN pilot.
What will the TNC audience take away from your talk?
The current version of the inter-federation eduGAIN is using the legacy technical standard SAML. Over the last years there has been developments around newer technologies such as OpenID Connect and verifiable credentials together with the new identity federation standard OpenID Federation. The takeaway from the session is an orientation around the new standard and the current work.
| Are you a first time speaker at TNC? | No |
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