2024 Workplan

Aims:

• To progress REFEDS position as an important player within the access and identity management space internationally.  
• To build on established relationships with GÉANT project and other federation-related activities around the world. 

Aim:

• To provide infrastructure and support for evolving ideas and areas in the REFEDS community. 

FOG: Federation Operators Group

 An operator group for NREN's offering an IdP service that is not bound to a specific organisation, for example as an IdP of last resort and IdP for home organisations that don't manage their own. This is a place to discuss and exchange ideas and operational guidelines.

A possible first outcome could be a position paper on how eduIDs perceive themselves (what unifies the eduID?)

To find information about federations today requires that you go to each one of them you're interested to and manually gather the information or go to eduGAIN technical site and look for what is manually registered there. This working group discusses and (may) define a metadata extension that includes information and policy links plus contact information that is published in the federation metadata feed. This will allow others to aggregate this information, for example, in MET and the technical eduGAIN site. The solution should be federation technology agnostic, with examples for both SAML and OpenID technology federations.

Provide input to APIs under development by the browser community to implement new privacy controls managed by the browser. In FedCM ("A privacy preserving federated identity Web API" - quote from GitHub) several browser vendors are working to ensure users can still use buttons for "Sign in with <third party IdP vendor>..." even as the privacy-preserving practices around third-party cookies etc. are rolled out - privacy practices that would inevitably break the current login pattern. This baseline will enable us to continue offering our R&E community federated access as long as we take part in its development, and adapt our community's critical software stacks.

Supporting Open Science Through Attributes

Programs such as the US Government's Open Science initiative are likely to drive requirements for attributes beyond "researcher" and "member". Resource Providers will need additional information about a person’s qualifications in order to determine access to their services. This work item intends to

1. Capture use cases for open access/open science in order to identify the various classes of problems that will need to be addressed
2. Collate and compare existing community efforts that may be able to support these use cases and authorization decisions
3. Make recommendations for how the identified problems could be addressed.

Formalise SeamlessAccess trustinfo metadata as a REFEDS specification

Trustinfo metadata has been developed by the SeamlessAccess team. A working document exists and code is in development (perhaps even deployed) in SeamlessAccess. This work item is to take the specification through the REFEDS standardization process, which should facilitate uptake by federation operators.

To define a REFEDS profile for registering support for entity categories or frameworks in metadata

Today all working groups need to define if and how an entity shall indicate in metadata that they support a specific REFEDS specification. This working group will define a REFEDS framework on how this should be done. Today REFEDS entity categories and SIRTFI have this defined in their specifications but it would be good to have a specific profile on how to do this for all REFEDS frameworks, profiles, and entity categories.

Aims:

• To provide materials and support mechanisms to help federations promote effective approaches to IdPs and SPs.
• To provide feedback on documents produced by other groups to support clarity of messages.
• To reach out to target groups where specific messaging could be beneficial.

Aims:

• To provide support for the development of standards and specifications under the REFEDS banner.
• To pilot specification work to support implementation requirements.
• To put in place structures to ensure specification and schema sustainability.

Schema management

Work will focus on maintenance, considering updates as requested by the community

Standardizing REFEDS standards

There are areas of REFEDS specification creation that could use improvements specifically:

• to ensure that repeatables elements within specifications are standardised and worded in the same way for consistency and user support
• to create a standard way of editing and managing changes to specifications within working groups (e.g github?)

This would help us step up as a standardisation body and give the sort of consistency seen in other areas.

Aims:

• To support the basic REFEDS infrastructure needs (website, wiki, and mailing lists).