Steering Committee Notes, 12 March 2024

5min

• Introductions
• SC meeting schedule for 2024

• MRPS Template v2 status - group has come up with responses to all the comments; HF is holding the pen on creating the final draft and will submit to the SC later this month
• 2024 has seen more new WG form than we've seen in a long time. Groups have started meeting and have mailing lists, chairs, and Slack channels for discussion.

• How are we doing?
• Question about whether we are meeting the trust and leadership. Trust is more about certification so there is cross-sector trust. Within our community we have implicit trust, but that limits our scale. Looking at developments in our federation where half the NRENs do not have a fixed budget to run the federation, then this is not a good sign in our world. While federations are called out as critical infrastructure, they are not treated that way. And the REFEDS strategy only lightly speaks to our role in helping the world recognize federations as critical infrastructure.
• The changing landscape, as noted by the meeting last week at Internet2 in Chicago, sees a change in IAM infrastructure on campuses. It's more than just what tools will be used. It's that they are losing IAM expertise. The fundamentals of IAM knowledge, the techniques, practices, and needs in higher ed and research, is a knowledge set that's disappearing. Need to focus on promulgating the knowledge of R&E IAM practices, which includes federation.
• When talking to Microsoft, they were willing to help, but they need consistent, clear input such that their product people can easily understand the requirements.
• There is also the concern in some areas that the existing IAM federation people are ageing out and we aren't interesting to new IAM people.
• We don't have a blueprint as to how all our specs and best practices come together. They were invented by architects who had an understanding (who developed) the underlying fabric, but new generations don't know the details and so they don't know how it all connects.
  • Maybe an AARC Blueprint profile for REFEDS? Maybe a larger roadmap?

(See email thread on SC)

The CTO of higher education for Microsoft was at the conference last week. This is his second year in the role, and he's learned a lot. He explained how Microsoft internally views this. MS customers submit their requests independently and are representing a wide, disparate range of needs. Even when they are talking about federations, the language they use and the intent behind it are inconsistent. The industry needs to speak in ways that MS understands, and saying "support Shibboleth" or "support my federation" is not sufficient. They need precise requirements based on business objectives. Example: if we want them to support RAF, why is it important and what does support look like.

They are specifically talking about Entra/Axure ID. They are looking to REFEDS to be that common voice.

What about the Kantara SAML V2.0 Implementation Profile for Federation Interoperability (from 2018)? It's something like that. That's an implementation profile for SAML2 federation interoperability, but what we rely on is more than SAML. SAML is the carrier to deliver information. eduPerson and RAF are not about SAML. Given that, we don't have precise instructions to an organization like MS because that distinction is not clear from the outside.

If MS IdPs could signal MFA, that would be of great value and might be an easy way to start.

We are making tactical advances but they often revert because the fundamental understanding isn't there.

The interaction with Google is much the same challenge; they are only driven by "show me what breaks" not "we can see this won't work; fix it."

Is this work where REFEDS should spin up a group specifically for Microsoft (specifically Corey) that they can take and use? Yes, but we need to do this in conjunction with a group like the CIO Forum, because they need a higher ed view, not just a federation view. There needs to be a campus-level part in there that will help.

There is an SP side of this as well, but we likely should focus on the IdP side for now.

Next steps: Albert and Heather to draft a message to REFEDS. Strongly suggest we make sure to liaise with InCommon Steering or the AAF CIO group. Would be useful to have an artefact (a video, slide deck, something) that explains federations in a higher ed context, or at least eduGAIN. Albert will start a google doc to get these thoughts down so we can iterate.