ACADEMIA

The EDIT Consortium of Internet2 and EDUCAUSE has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for its ongoing work in the development of important middleware technologies. The grant will support further work in identity and access management and infrastructure that organizations use to verify and manage online user identity and access. Research and education collaboration teams share many online tools and resources to do their work, including calendars, email list services, wikis and document sharing software. One of the primary goals of the EDIT Consortium is to help such groups improve their productivity through scalable tools that enable appropriate access to protected online resources. For instance, when a project member is added or removed from a particular team or class, each service or tool must be updated (by hand in many cases) to reflect the person's access rights to the group's or class's shared resources. Because of this, managing authentication and authorization for all of a project's resources has over time become an administrative and security burden. Through its award from NSF's Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program -- a continuation of the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) -- the EDIT team will work to extend and integrate its authentication and authorization tools to greatly enhance and streamline the management of collaborative online environments. "Collaborators want tools such as shared calendaring, videoconferencing, and wikis that integrate their teaching and research lives and their institutional and inter-institutional worlds," said Ken Klingenstein, Internet2 senior director of middleware and security and principal investigator for the grant. "Leveraging our work in authentication and authorization, we can provide a way for distributed users to manage many of the identity-oriented requirements of common collaboration tools." Building on the consortium's existing work -- including Shibboleth Single Sign-on and Federating Software, Grouper Groups Management Toolkit and Signet Privilege Management System -- EDIT is developing a collaboration approach that enables IT administrators, faculty, and other group leaders the ability to make group membership and resource privilege changes using one consolidated tool, rather than updating each individual application. This improves security and reduces the time needed to manage project groups, both on and off campus. The consortium and development lead, Internet2, will distribute a majority of the funding to campuses, supporting part-time middleware experts to serve as technical leaders and developers. EDUCAUSE will guide the outreach activities, leveraging existing momentum developed over the last seven years of outreach on identity and access management. For more information: EDIT Consortium: www.nmi-edit.org Internet2: www.internet2.edu EDUCAUSE: www.educause.edu