Learn about the latest developments in the trust and identity (T&I) space or even influence the course of ongoing projects in the T&I Incubator mid-term demonstration, on 1&2 June 2021. Anybody with an interest is welcome to participate and registration is open: https://events.geant.org/event/794/
The ‘T&I Incubator’ develops, fosters and matures new ideas in the Trust and Identity space for research and education (R&E) and investigates new technologies that do not (yet) have a place in the GÉANT (GN4-3) project T&I services ecosystem. The Incubator was a new line of work in the GN4-3 project and its work is largely based on ideas and suggestions from the GÉANT community. To be considered, these ideas need to demonstrate a value for either enhancing existing services or exploring new service models and/or new potential services in line with emerged use-cases. For this reason, great importance is attached to enabling community engagement and demonstration events are planned for the middle and end of every 7-month cycle. These so called sprint demos showcase the work done and allow the community to learn about its results, ask questions and provide feedback.
Topics in the June event
The June 2021 event will present six activities that were selected from 13 proposals submitted for the fourth Incubator cycle, which began in March. These six topics that the Incubator team is currently working on are:
- ‘Test IdP’ – an easy-to-use, user-configurable test identity provider for the R&E community;
- ‘OIDC OP support addition to SimpleSAMLphp’ – an extension of the popular IdP/SP software SimpleSAMLphp to add an OpenID Connect Provider interface;
- ‘Porting oidc-agent to Windows’ – an adoption of the oidc-agent command line tools for Windows;
- ‘Using Distributed Identity for managing researcher access’ – a distributed approach to provide digital identities to let users be in direct control of the profile information they share with services;
- ‘IdP/SP software testbed’ – a fully fledged dynamic test environment for new and existing federated software products to enable quick and easy integration testing;
- ‘eduGAIN Service Catalogue’ – a centralised overview of federated services in eduGAIN.
Each activity will be presented and discussed during a one-hour slot that starts on the hour. It is therefore possible to attend only individual sessions.
Previous Incubator activities and achievements
Since the beginning of the GN4-3 project, the Incubator has already run three full activity cycles in which 13 projects were completed, including two from the Trust & Identity Mentorship (TIM) programme, touching upon many areas in the Trust and Identity domain. A complete overview of past and current Incubator activities can be found on the Incubator Dashboard. The results of this work range from reports and guidance documents to (technical) proof-of-concept implementations and enhancement or creation of new software products. Several of these software products were handed over to the broader academic community, or have been (or will be) integrated into existing GÉANT T&I services.
Future opportunities
New proposals for T&I Incubator activities are always welcome and can be submitted at any time via the ‘Call for Ideas’ wiki page. The deadline for submitting new ideas for the next Incubator cycle is 5 September 2021. The final demonstration event for the current Incubator sprint cycle is currently planned for 14 or 16 September 2021 (date to be confirmed).
