Roaming and Authorisation

Before the vision of a truly open European research area can be realised, it must be possible to establish interoperable access to the networks that interconnect to form the research networking supply chain in Europe. To the user, the multiple networks must appear to be one seamless resource. A researcher visiting a collaborator in Paris should be able to log on to the network and access the local resources on his computer in Poznan easily.

In order to make this possible, interoperable systems for roaming, for verifying users' identities and associated rights or privileges (authentication), and granting access to resources (authorisation), are required, both in the network and at the service level. The Roaming and Authorisation research activity has been created to address this requirement.

The activity has grown out of the work carried out by the TERENA task forces TF-AACE (Authentication and Authorisation Collaboration for Europe) and TF-Mobility. Rather than seeking to replace the work already progressing in organisations that are participating in GÉANT2, the joint research activity will establish interoperability between them, and will complement and support the work of other activities in the research networking community.

The main tasks at the beginning of the activity are to define, prototype and then build a roaming infrastructure, and an authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI). Once this infrastructure has been successfully established, the activity will investigate the integration of both these more dedicated solutions into one infrastructure. In the longer term, single sign-on capabilities will be investigated, and the scope of the activity widened to embrace new technologies.

Although the scope of the Roaming and Authorisation activity has been very precisely defined, the options it investigates, and the solutions that it decides on, obviously have implications across the range of service and research activities being carried out within the project. Its main areas of interaction are with the Performance, Security and Bandwidth on Demand activities. The Roaming and Authorisation activity is responsible for addressing general issues relating to AA implementation, although the research activities themselves are likely to implement short-term access control systems relevant to their own particular areas (for example, within the security activity focusing on the specific issue of controlling and protecting access to the network elements).