Federated Identity Appliance for Education

Aegis’s Federated Identity Appliance for Education provides an opportunity for universities to quickly expand their reach by providing turn-key infrastructure necessary for enabling federated/external SSO to InCommon Federation's member service providers. Universities are continually challenged to provide students, faculty, and staff with access to protected external resources such as Apple iTunesU, Turnitin, external libraries and other collaborative resources. Federated identity, also known as external single sign-on, eliminates the need for organizations and partners to manage accounts, passwords, and credentials for this external access through the use of single sign-on using existing, internal university credentials. Federated SSO consists of Identity Providers (IDPs) and Service Providers (SPs). An identity provider handles the authentication of the user to validate that they are indeed an active member of the IDP’s organization. A Service Provider represents an organization wishing to allow external users to access their resources (e.g., Microsoft Dreamspark).

In the U.S., the research and education community has established the InCommon® Federation* through which higher education institutions and their service provider partners agree on a set of shared policies, processes, and technology standards. One of those standards is a process for single sign-on, so one set of credentials provides access to resources from any service provider in the Federation, without the need for another user ID or password. InCommon Federation provides a valuable service to both universities and their partners by acting as a hub for multiple federation partners. Without InCommon Federation, each university would need to create a point-to-point federation with each service provider, increasing cost and complexity for both the universities and the service providers.

Aegis Appliance Solution

 

Figure 2: Appliance Benefits

Aegis’s Identity Appliance Infrastructure

 

Conclusion

* InCommon is a registered trademark or trademarks of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (also known as Internet2) and/or InCommon, LLC in the United States and/or other countries. AegisUSA is not authorized, sponsored, or endorsed by University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development/Internet2 and/or InCommon, LLC.