Federated Access Management 102

Federated Access Management 102key concepts you need to become your institution’s local expert

John Paschoud

InfoSystems Engineer, LSE Library

London School of Economics & Political Science, UK

[email protected]

Copyright John Paschoud 2007. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on

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The intellectual property of others in all contributed and referenced material is acknowledged.

Joint Information Systems Committee 2

Animation: even 2-dimensional people need Access Management


What do our Users want from Access Management?

Nothing! - they just want to get stuff. Now!

Single Sign-On (as far as possible)

– to our own services, and to all the resources we subscribe on their behalf

– no need to remember so many passwords for different services

Access from Anywhere

– from home, travelling, or working at other institutions or libraries

Improved Privacy

– of personal information, and of research being pursued


What do We want from Access Management?

(“We” being the people whose job is to provide institutional information services)

Improved security for licensed resources, so publishers we deal with are happy (and generous!)

Good privacy-protection for users, to meet our legal obligations

Low-hassle support for our on-campus and mobile users

Opportunity for ‘fine-grain’ authorization control, so we can know (and manage) Who-Has-Access-to-What

Access for visiting users to whatever they are entitled

– by their home institutions

– …which we don’t need to know about!


Objectives of Federated Access Management

Effective Single Sign-On to non-public online resources…

…across many domains

Distribution of Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting functions in the AM process to appropriate parties

Improved security for resources that are non-public due to:

– Licensing restrictions / Commercial intellectual property

– Confidentiality

Improved privacy of end-user personal information

Reduced duplicated administration of user identities & passwords

(Cite Clifford Lynch and the Coalition for Networked Information, 1998, for where these principles were seminally defined)


Appropriate Division of Labour (Labor)

With Federated Access Management, functions are carried out by appropriate parties:

Identity Provider (typically a university/college/library) does Authentication (of it’s own registered users)

– “IdP” -- “AuthN”

Service Provider (typically a publisher) does Authorization ideally based on a common role (“student”) and affiliation (“lse.ac.uk”)

– “SP” -- “AuthZ”– (the “z” shows how you frequently have to discuss this with Americans, who can’t spell

properly)

A Federation provides a trust framework between parties, operates ‘Where Are You From’ (“WAYF”) service

– Needed where users from many IdPs are accessing many SPs

– (Athens, and some other people, may call this a ‘Home Domain Discovery Service’)

– Athens isn’t a federation


The Institution as Service Provider (too)

We can share resources in collaborations within the academic community

– providing controlled access to users from other institutions, without needing to administer usernames/passwords for them

– as LSE and Columbia (NY) did for a collaborative Anthropology teaching project (DART)

We can set up our repository, e-learning or any other service as a Service Provider

– as LSE has done for Exam Papers and other ‘members only’ collections


Access to internal resources: LSE Exam Papers collection


Costs and Benefits of adopting Federated Access Management?

Costs (for an institution):

Institution’s directory must be in good shape and set up to support an Identity Provider (IdP) service

– (just as it does for “AthensDA”)

IdP middleware needs installing and maintaining

– (or subscribed-to from an external provider)

Benefits (for an institution):

Reduced overheads in password support

No difference in on-campus and off-campus access

More flexible access control – e.g. different categories of users to different levels of access (or none) to a resource

Access control maintenance for different internal services (most with role-based access) is eliminated!


Access via a library portal to external resources

A user can just go to the list of e-resources in the library’s portal.

In the LSE Library’s case our ‘Electronic Library’ is run from Endeavor’s Encompass system:

…but it could just be a list of links on a ‘hand-crafted’ web page



The expanded list shows a link direct to the Service Provider, in this case Elsevier



After clicking link in library portal:


Demonstration: What does FAM look like to an end-user?

Elsevier Science Direct – an ‘early-adopting’ publisher

– …dealing with a global customer base

– …needs-to-know only whether user is from a licensed institution

– http://www.sciencedirect.com/ (and use ‘Athens/Other Institution Login’)

LSE Projects wiki – a highly-restricted institutional resource

– …with users spread across 10+ HE institutions (current project partners)

– …needs to know personal identity and other user attributes

– https://gabriel.lse.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Projects/AboutJohnPaschoud

– (and then ‘Edit’ this page)

Shibboleth Wiki – a global discussion space

– https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/SHIB/WebHome (and use ‘Log In’)


How does FAM (using Shibboleth) work?R

eso

urc

e

WAYF

Identity ProviderService Provider

Web Site

1

ACS

I don’t know you.Not even which home

org you are from.I redirect your request

to the WAYF32

Please tell me where are you from?

HS

5

6

I don’t know you.Please authenticateUsing WEBLOGIN

7

User DB

Credentials

OK, I know you now.I redirect your requestto the target, together

with a handle

4

OK, I redirect yourrequest now to

the Handle Service of your home org.

AR

Handle

Handle8

I don’t know theattributes of this user.Let’s ask the Attribute

Authority

Handle9AA

Let’s pass over the attributes the userhas allowed me to

release

Attributes 10

Res

ou

rce

Man

ag

er

Attributes

OK, based on theattributes, I grant

access to the resource


Relevant Standards to FAM

SAML: Security Assertion Markup Language (OASIS)

– http://xml.coverpages.org/saml.html

Shibboleth: an open source profile SAML implementation for federated access management (Internet2 Network Middleware Initiative)

– http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/

…most current country-level and international initiatives in FAM are ‘Shibboleth-compliant’, or converging on interoperability with Shibboleth

…but many other implementations of SAML now exist across other business sectors, and Guanxi and AthensIM are two implementations that have been developed within the UK community

eduPerson: an LDAP object class to describe people in (higher) education (EDUCAUSE / Internet2)

– http://www.educause.edu/eduperson/


Attributes in Common use

eduPersonScopedAffiliation

– indicates the user’s relationship (e.g., staff, student, etc.) with the organisation (IdP). For many applications, examination of this attribute is sufficient to determine whether the user has sufficient privilege to access the resource.

eduPersonTargetedID

– If a service provider is presented only with the affiliation of an anonymous subject, as provided by eduPersonScopedAffiliation, it cannot provide service personalisation or usage monitoring across sessions. These capabilities are enabled by the eduPersonTargetedID attribute, which provides a persistent user pseudonym, distinct for each service provider.

eduPersonPrincipalName

– used where a persistent user identifier, consistent across different services, is required. It often corresponds to the user’s single sign-on (SSO) name, and may be useful for securing both internal institutional services and external services where access control lists are used.

eduPersonEntitlement

– enables an organisation to assert that a user satisfies an additional set of specific conditions that apply for access to a particular resource. A user may possess different values of the eduPersonEntitlement attribute relevant to different resources.


Worldwide -- Federated SAML Adoption within Higher Education

Australia

Belgium

Canada

China

Denmark

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

New Zealand

Norway

Spain

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

The Netherlands

United Kingdom

United States


The job’s not over!

Recognising gaps in support for institutions, as experience is gained

– Better presentation of practical guides

– Identity Management by institutions

– Levels of Assurance for different resources

The Identity Project

– Undertaking a national survey of (all 641) institutions

– Producing a model for institutional IdM audits

– Reporting on issues for Health, National Grid Service and others

(Make sure your institution has completed the Identity Management survey at www.identity-project.info !)

The ES-LoA Project

– Analysing levels of AuthN and AuthZ required for different services

– Recommending how these can be expressed in Federation-approved attributes


www.ukfederation.org.ukwww.jisc.ac.uk/federation.html

http://www.angel.ac.uk/ShibbolethAtLSEwww.identity-project.info

[email protected]@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

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Federated Access Management 102