This page is about a service, offered by SURFin development at SURF (production slated for Q3 2020), that makes it easier for research collaborations to set up and manage access to (data and compute) services they need for their projects. Using our service saves those collaborations time and enables them enables collaborations to spent more time on research instead of managing infrastructure. Everybody involved benefits: researchers, providers of services for researchers and institutions. Anybody is invited to read about the service, but it the service is geared towards Dutch led research projects .
Don't want to read the information below but want to know how this can help you? Or have questions? You can send us an email and we'll set up a call!
Table of Contents |
---|
...
Research is more and more about collaboration, also confirmed in the Dutch NWO 2019-2022-strategy. Researchers that want to collaborate (internationally) and providers of resources who parties that want to offer research facilities to collaborative organisations therefor face the question: how to provide secure access to resources.? Researchers have typical access needs that aren't taken care of by the current solutions, and they have documented them in FIM4R-documents (Federated Identity Management for Research). We address a number of those problems in the SCZ-project:
Providing access to invited people to the actual resources currently often takes a relatively long time (working with system admins of all resources, setting up 'account management', provisioning etc).
Researchers often want access to 'non-web' services (think of resources accessed via SSH or WebDAV ): those are currently not tied to their institutional accounts, which makes access revocation a problem.
Research is often international and providing people without an institutional account (eg from companies involved in the research project, 'guest-access') secure access often is a problem.
Authorization often is a problem. Group membership can be used to decide on authorization: what is a user allowed to do within a certain service? This requires a solution that can convert the group information into attributes that are subsequently consumed and interpreted by the resources to be shared (eg wikis, compute or data) for authorising users.
Currently, for every new research the wheel is reinvented to arrange for the things mentioned. Collaborations and research are delayed in the start-up phase because providing access takes time. What if there was a plug and play service?
People from around the world have been thinking about how to solve the access issues, a solution was architected, and project SCZ is building an implementation of that international effort.
A great basis for easy secure access, is using the institutional accounts most researchers have. This for instance allows easy set up, easy validation, and better control when a researcher for instance stops working for an institution.
In the European AARC-project (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration) the specific identity and access challenges researchers face are addressed, and they made a clear video about the problem:
Widget Connector | ||
---|---|---|
|
AARC crafted a blueprint architecture that addresses those challenges. SCZ is basically doing an implementation of that blueprint.
We provide an Authentication & Authorisation Infrastructure-as-a-Service focused on the needs of researchers, research projects and providers of resources for researchers. It takes care of user management. The service name: SURF Research Access Management (SRAM). On these pages we describe what the SCZ project and the resulting SRAM-service is about.
Besides SRAM, which is tailored for Dutch-led research projects, similar AARC-based initiatives exist, like the EOSC-Life AAI and eduTEAMS
.
With the SCZ project, we:
ensure that parties who want to share resources can do so by connecting the resource to the SCZ proxy (only once). The SCZ solution takes care, amongst others, of making the service available via eduGAIN.
provide an environment where institutions and collaborative organisations can quickly request a collaboration group, assign group managers and then manage that group themselves, invite people, etc.
provide a possibility to manage specific attributes per collaborative organisation.
ensure that people without an edu account can also easily be invited and access the resources, where possible with a higher 'Level of Assurance' than with a social identity.
ensure that non-web resources like SSH and WebDav can be approached via federated authentication (eg institutional account) (for the benefits of federated authentication see "Why federative"? ).
To get an extra idea of what SCZ wants to offer, here we share the 'user stories' (in broad outline) for which we want to offer a solution with SCZ.
Open Access and access regulation mechanisms often go together. Possible scenario's:
Schematically the SCZ can be drawn as follows:
The picture above shows that the research services are linked to the SCZ proxy: these services only have to make and maintain one link. The picture shows the features of the SCZ infrastructure:
Connects with eduGAIN so that research services are accessible for researchers at institutions outside the Netherlands.
Provides a mechanism (via COmanage) to invite users and manage groups and attributes (a so called 'Membership Management Service').
Provides a solution for people without an edu account to use services (such as via Google and / or other social accounts).
Provides a solution to securely unlock non-web services.
Wondering how a flow of inviting a user to access via SSH looks like? See the below video, but know this is just to get an idea as the environment is developing continuously (if the video doesn't start playing, try opening it full-screen via the icon in the top right corner. The cow-sound at the start of the video is related to the name of the company involved in work on COmanage, Spherical Cow Group of which the name is based on the usage of spherical cow, a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex real life phenomena):
...
allowfullscreen | true |
---|---|
src | https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwSgD_8NVoJcSTd4UmRqc0g1Yk0/preview |
name | How user enrollment works in COmanage |
width | 640 |
id | COmanageEnrollment |
title | COmanage enrollment |
height | 480 |
longdesc | Video showing how access to a SSH resource works via COmanage, which is part of the SCZ-stack |
People from around the world have been thinking about how to solve the access issues. In the European AARC-project (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration) the specific identity and access challenges researchers face are addressed, and they made a clear video about the problem:
Widget Connector | ||
---|---|---|
|
AARC crafted a blueprint architecture that addressed those challenges. SURF has followed up that development with a project (SCZ, Science Collaboration Zone), to develop a service based on the gained insights: SURF Research Access Management, SRAM. SRAM enables you to:
Invite your collaborators: as soon as someone accepts the invitation, accounts get created automatically for all connected services.
Connect to web and 'non-web' services (think of resources accessed via SSH or WebDAV ): with SRAM those can be tied to institutional accounts, improving access revocation.
Work with people from all over the world, either through their institutional account or one of the available guest identity providers SRAM offers.
Simply manage authorization. Group membership in SRAM is converted to attributes that can be used by the connected services to decide who can do what.
No more need for zero hours (nul-uren) accounts that take forever to arrange for and stay in existence far too long and often incur unnessary cost (for licenses for example). Currently, for every new research project the access-wheel is reinvented. Collaborations and research are delayed in the start-up phase because setting up secure access takes time (and IT-expertise). What if there was a plug and play service? SRAM is delivering just that.
SRAM provides an access Authentication & Authorisation Infrastructure-as-a-Service focused on the needs of researchers, research projects and providers of resources for researchers. It takes care of user management. On these pages we describe what SRAM is about.
Besides SRAM, which is tailored for Dutch-led research projects, similar AARC-based initiatives exist, like the EOSC-Life AAI and eduTEAMS.
providers of services for researcher also save time because they technically have to connect their services to SRAM only once (using open standards like LDAP, OIDC and SAML) and thereafter can easily offer their service to unlimited collaborations and people. Providers can configure and offload simple repetitive fault sensitive user creation tasks, while still being in control over which collaborations are are allowed access etc.
Here we share the 'user stories' (in broad outline) collected when we started developing SRAM.
Open Access and access regulation mechanisms often go together. Possible scenario's:
Schematically SRAM can be drawn as follows:
The picture above shows that the research services are linked to SRAM: these services only have to make and maintain one link to service all Dutch led research collaborations that use SRAM to manage access. The picture shows the features of SRAM:
Connects with eduGAIN so that research services are accessible for researchers at institutions outside the Netherlands.
Provides a mechanism (via a 'membership management service, like COmanage, Hexaa, Perun or SBS) to invite users and manage groups and attributes.
Provides a solution for people without an edu account to use services (guest providers in the Identity HUB, such as via ORCID, eIDAS, social accounts like from Microsoft and Google etc).
Provides a solution to securely access (web and) non-web services.
A Another way of logging in is shown in a video at the bottom of PAM Module. We've also made a connection to Azure AD VM's which we show in this video.
You can also try a demo yourself.
...
Many federated academic services require a few user attributes to successfully complete login, usually name, email, and a persistent user identifier (called the “R&S attribute bundle”). An international program called the Research & Scholarship Entity Category (R&S) was established to meet this need. This program enables federated services serving a research or scholarly purpose to request that their national R&E federation (as InCommon is for the US) “tag” them with the R&S entity category. It also specifies how R&E federation operators vet such requests to ensure that such tags are only applied to appropriate services.
...
Which technical components are used?
Interested in the components used? See Technical overview of SCZ .
Interested in the components used? See Technical overview of SCZCurious about how you can get started in COmanage? We have organised and provide links to End user documentation SCZ COmanage .
Connecting Services to the SCZ environment describes how to services to the SCZ infrastructure. A list of connected services can be found at https://mdq.pilot.scz.lab.surf.nl/role/sp.html .
...
...
Children Display | ||
---|---|---|
|