UKSG webinar: Authentication technology update: RA21 and OpenAthens with Josh Howlett, Jisc and Phil Leahy, Eduserv

Editor's Notes

• #11: Raise your hand if this happens at least once per year? Oncer per semester? Once per month? Anyone have this happen every week?
• #19: So what are the pilots you ask? We have a Corporate Pilot as well as two academic pilots: The P3W pilot - Privacy Preserving Persistent WAYF Pilot - quite the tongue twister And the WAYF Cloud pilot All seek to address the experience of access outside an institute and to streamline the UX – the user experience – in order to have a similar experience throughout – users do not like to be confronted again and again with new interfaces to master. So following this bit of context for an introduction, we can now go into a bit of detail on the pilots themselves.
• #20: The team have made great progress since the pilots started earlier this year: The publishers themselves have produced a new user experience workflow, which is about to be tested with pharma endusers The team have also agreed requirements for granular usage statistics which will be moved forward in the second half of the year; and The team have also explored a federated flow between publishers – this is more common in academia, but new for pharma. Early SAML testing with individuals was not scalable, so there is hope that a federate structure will be more streamlined.
• #21: So onto the first of the Academic pilots: the Privacy Preserving Persistent (P3) WAYF Pilot. There are several important things we are trying to investigate in this pilot: All pilots are addressing the UX in one way or another – If we don’t streamline the UX for authentication, we won’t get endusers to adopt the solution We want to make sure the identity provider discovery is consistent; we have a multiple of science providers participating – the idea is if an enduser selects your identity with one; they won’t have to repeat for the others; but this sharing of information creates a privacy problem, thus we aim for cross-provider persistence of WAYF choice using browser local storage. There is a rather large set of folks collaborating on this; originally two pilots combined. It is managed by Geant, and has participation of several access management Federations, Sunet, EduServ are two examples, as well as publishers and subscribing institutions MIT UC Davis, and many well known service providers: ProQuest, LibLynx, Ebsco
• #22: So to recap – the P3WAYF pilot would like to make clear to users they only require the domain part of their email (some UX challenges there, but we will solve it), and that their IdP preference is stored locally in the browser, retrieved using centrally served javascript, not on central server.
• #23: This pilot is actually similar to the PW3 Pilot, but the implementation is different. The goals are similar to the rest of the pilots: Seamless Access as close to IP Authentication as possible - go from 6 clicks to zero as much as possible Eliminate steps which users have to repeat for every publisher Support for remote access RA21 are hoping to create a shared infrastructure for sharing WAYF data amongst publishers. We hope to test out – if we build a shared open infrastructure – how would governance and data formats work?
• #24: We have built an infrastructure not owned by anybody. The infrastructure will hold a hash key for each user which is mapped through cookies on the users device so users do not have to repeat, and the information gets carried which will allow publishers to exchange information with each other and get close to the IP authentication experience. So let look at a use case:
• #25: And involvement of multiple stakeholders is in an of itself a guiding principle. There is a chain of parties involved in access and authentication, and if we don’t solve these problems together, solutions will never work. We are including people from the library world, vendors, and identity management communities. You see here the list of members on the RA21 steering committee, but there is also an outreach committee, which I chair; and we are in the process of forming an advisory committee for the project. We still have a few seats free so if you are interested, please feel free to reach out following the AGLIN forum to make yourself known. RA21 has some funding for a Program Director, in this case Julia Wallace, who is based in the UK and for whom we are grateful; and also the very necessary Heather Flanagan, our project coordinator, who is managing many of the logistics around the pilots which we will discuss shortly.
• #26: Thank you for your kind attention. We would love to have you involved with any of the pilots. While we currently have a lot of active leadership and participation from the US and UK, we are actively seeking greater involvement from Europe and Australasia. There are a couple of ways you can register your interest: Through our mailing list, or emailing our project leaders directly. We are also happy to answer any questions off line, or connect with me directly Ann Gabriel a.gabriel@Elsevier.com