ASREN Holds Workshop on Identity Federation Infrastructure

BEIRUT- The Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN), headed by its Chairman HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, held a specialized workshop on " Identity Federation Infrastructure" with the attendance of representatives of scientific research networks and universities in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Malawi, Morocco, Oman, Tunisia and in addition to Jordan.

The workshop, that took place at the premises of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, December 3-4 2016, concentrated on technologies which allow federated access to the services. It focused on identity federations which are used for federated access to web based services but it has also tackled eduroam infrastructure.

Participants had an overview of eduroam, identity federations and eduGAIN, and they were able to prepare policies and agreements, which will be signed with GEANT representatives in order to connect to the global community.

Participants learnt how to build national federation, and how to install and configure Shibboleth v3 for the home organization and connect it to the national federation. Which sets the stage for them to then connect national identity federation to the eduGAIN.

One of the objectives for holding the workshop was to ensure the provision of research resources and applications and help researchers and academics have access to classified databases, which mainly rely on Identity Federation such as ASREN Science Gateway, in addition to other scientific research portals as well as their applications.

The workshop was held in cooperation with EUMEDCONENCT Project, and the Middleware for Collaborative Applications and Global virtual Communities -MAGIC Project; both funded by the European Commission.