Researchers that want to collaborate (internationally) and providers of resources who want to offer research facilities to collaborative organisations often face questions related to providing access to resources. The SCZ project (SCZ, FIAM for collaborating researchers) tries to solve a number of issues in the field of authentication, authorization and policies.
This page is for people who want to know more about the infrastructure the SCZ-project is building & piloting. The project also examines whether and, if so, how the SCZ can be offered by SURF as a service.
SURF is collaborating in this project with Dutch institutions, but the general solution is usable in any country.
There are a number of specific problems for collaborations between researchers, which we address in the SCZ-project:
Something has to be arranged to invite people who need access to resources (invites, enrollment). There is a need to manage collaboration groups (membership etc).
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).
Apart from enabling access to browser-based services, for 'non-web' services (think of resources accessed via SSH or WebDAV ) there are currently no possibilities for federated authentication.
Giving access to a service to international (in our case non-Dutch) researchers and people without an institutional account (eg from companies involved in the research project) requires a relatively large amount of work.
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 authorizing 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.
In the SCZ project, we want to:
Ensure that parties who want to share resources can do so by smoothly (and only once) connecting the resource to the SCZ proxy. The SCZ solution takes care, amongst others, of making the service available via eduGAIN.
Provide an environment where institutions and cooperative 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.
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.
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 video at the bottom of the End user documentation SCZ COmanage .
In June 2017 phase 1 of the project was completed, and phase 2 started. In phase 1, use cases were drawn up and coordinated with a number of cooperative organizations, an architecture was drawn up and needs were assessed. Phase 2, which runs from now until the third quarter of 2018, is dedicated to realizing the various components and gaining experience through pilots.
SCZ phase 2 focuses on:
Building a largest-commoner service for use cases and pilots.
Building the SCZ technical infrastructure
Drafting the SCZ policy.
Testing the SCZ technical infrastructure and policy on the described use cases.
Acquiring experience with the SCZ through pilot projects with institutions
Drafting a business case.
Schedule
The following institutions and parties have indicated that they want to participate in the pilot::
Other parties that have shown an interest / have contacted SCZ: Deltares, TraIT / Lygature, TUe, Donders Institute, VUmc, uTwente / NLeScience City Cloud Project, AuthorE / TrustDocA / Erasmus MC, SURFsara (Research Cloud).
The institutions involved in pilots are expected to participate in meetings and allow the right people within the institution to test the pilot environment, provide feedback to SURF and participate in talks about new features and requirements.
Interested or questions? See under ' More information '.
Interested in the components used? See Technical overview of SCZ .
Curious 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.
Enabling a service / resource for federated authentication means users can 'login' (authenticate) with their institutional account: as soon as they want to acces a service, they are automatically forwarded to the login screen of their institution (or other organization where they have an account, if that can be used, such as a bank). Reasons to arrange this like this:
SURF is conducting the pilots to also answer this question. In this way, after the pilots, we can draw conclusions about the functionalities: does the SCZ actually solve these problems? We also have a better idea of the feasability to offer this centrally and if so including the costs (in equipment and people) that are needed to offer such a central infrastructure. In the summer of 2018 we will decide on this based on the experiences with the pilots. Naturally, the pilot partners have considerable influence on this process. Should it be decided not to offer the SCZ as a service, we will enter into a phase-out process with each pilot partner, for example SURF can help transfer the infrastructure to a local copy an institution can run locally.
We have a mailing list for this project. An archive of previously shared messages can be found via https://list.surfnet.nl/mailman/private/projectscz-fiam . Feel free to sign up for that list via https://list.surfnet.nl/mailman/listinfo/projectscz-fiam . Interested? Ask? Suggestions? Mail with Raoul Teeuwen ( raoul.teeuwen@surfnet.nl ).