The new AARC Engagement Group for Infrastructures – AEGIS – has endorsed AARC project “Guidelines on expressing group membership and role information”. By agreeing to these guidelines, AEGIS has taken its first step in providing practical support towards the wider uptake of AARC’s interoperable federated access solutions.

Invited representatives from 5 e-infrastructures and 2 domain-specific research infrastructures participated in the second AEGIS meeting, on 13 November 2017, where they made this decision and reviewed other progress and activities in the AARC (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration) project. AEGIS was launched by AARC in June as a way for the project to engage directly with relevant experts from research communities and e-infrastructures who are implementing authentication and authorisation services as a tool to enable research collaboration. The first AEGIS meeting was held in October 2017.

Bi-directional channel

AEGIS provides a bi-directional channel so that AARC and the research and e-infrastructures community can advise each other on developments and implementation aspects of the project. AEGIS in practice provides a mechanism to ensure that AARC results are fit for purpose and are known to those that will need to deploy them. AEGIS helps participating infrastructures to understand the importance of adopting AARC frameworks, and helps to uncover issues that may otherwise emerge during the deployment phase.

A step towards interoperability

The guidelines document that was endorsed in the November AEGIS meeting agrees on a common way to exchange group information across different infrastructures; group information is commonly used by service providers to authorise user access to resources, but the information is not interpreted in a uniform way. By endorsing these guidelines, AEGIS is helping to resolve these issues and easing the way towards interoperability between different infrastructures.

Meet the team!

The next AEGIS meeting will be an open workshop that will be co-located with the EOSC pilot stakeholder forum in Brussels on 29 November. The aim of the workshop is to better understand the obstacles researchers face in terms of authentication and authorisation when doing their daily work.

We would really welcome representatives from the research and e-infrastructures during this meeting. More information about the AEGIS open workshop is online.

Further information

AARC is addressing the growing need for research infrastructures and e-infrastructures to use federated access and authentication and authorisation mechanisms in ways that will allow interoperation and collaboration. The project is creating a common framework that encompasses a single blueprint architecture, one set of policies and one collection of training materials that should work for everyone, and is working with research collaborations to pilot and improve specific technical and policy aspects.

Read the document “Guidelines on expressing group membership and role information” on the Blueprint Architectures section of the AARC website.

Read more about AEGIS.