Incommon unifies information

Scientific researchers interested in the InCommon Federation can steer clear of obstacles to joining with a new roadmap developed by IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and Pervasive Technology Institute.

“The goal of the document is to walk people through concerns, often very correct concerns,” said CACR Associate Director and principal investigator on the roadmap project William Barnett. “Not all institutions know how to get this (InCommon) up and
running.”

He said InCommon is an “organization of many organizations — about 200 — banded together to share federated identity systems.”

Federated identities allow a user’s identity from one organization to be used across multiple organizations, according to the roadmap, and the organizations forming a federation agree to “a common set of practices and policies.”

This is practical, said CACR Deputy Director Von Welch, who authored the document along with Barnett, Alan Walsh and IU Pervasive Technology Institute Executive Director Craig Stewart, because it lets everybody “talk identities back and forth” without worrying whether the other party uses Linux or Microsoft, for example.

InCommon is already popular for services in broad use such as digital libraries and access to online journals, Welch said; the roadmap, however, seeks to “foster and help cross-university collaboration.”

“Our vision is to coordinate computers, data and instruments to drive scientific research,” Welch said. 

Barnett listed technical and policy barriers, as well as people simply not knowing the value of InCommon, as reasons for the roadmap to be used.

Matt Elder, a programmer analyst for the University of California, San Diego, said he has been working with InCommon for about five years.

“This is good because a lot of folks don’t understand what federated identities and identity management are,” Elder said. “I think this is a good way of marketing it.”

These federated identities allow for a level of trust in InCommon that leads to more collaboration in research, Barnett said, as users are credentialed. The identities allow for easier login and access to data from other universities.

Students may benefit from InCommon and the roadmap as well.

“It really was designed to support faculty researchers, but as we were developing it we saw obvious opportunities for undergraduates and graduates to support their research,” Barnett said.

Welch said federated identity technologies have been around for decades, but they’ve had a slow time taking off because of trust issues. InCommon, which has been around “for the better part of a decade, if not longer,” has built up that trust.
Welch said they have already received some positive feedback.

“Some developers said it helped them know about issues before they got started,” Welch said.

IU is one of the national leaders in federated identities.

“It’s tremendous having these folks. They’ve made it so easy,” Barnett said.
The roadmap is available in full and abbreviated forms as a PDF at www.incommon.org/cyberroadmap.html.