Identity Management
The CIC Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are committed to supporting a technology framework for sharing applications and resources between member institutions by employing a federated model that allows individuals to securely log in at each CIC university using their campus identification and password. By developing a trust framework and underlying technology that insures the identities of member institution faculty, staff and students, the opportunity to collaboratively develop and share digital resources is greatly expanded.
The effort is guided by three key objectives:
- Constantly improve the ease with which CIC institutions can federate applications and services between themselves.
- Position CIC institutions to be able to perform ever-increasingly higher stakes online transactions with each other and other organizations relevant to the missions of our institutions.
- Seek opportunities to provide national leadership or take national leadership positions on emerging technologies, practices, and solutions in trust and identity.
The CIC CIOs have charged
members of the Identity Management Taskforce with responsibility for addressing these challenges between now and the end of 2012. That group has identified three projects on which to focus their attention:
- TeraGrid Pilot – CIC universities represent about 20% of use of this NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure project, and developing common practices and policies for managing users in a federated environment represents a collaborative opportunity for the CIC. The first step is helping to shape an Incident Response Policy, which is expected to be proposed early in 2010.
- Federating Guest Wireless – The ability for students, faculty, and staff to travel to other CIC schools and log in to the wireless networks without the need for guest accounts would be much more efficient and useful. This project is exploring several options to enable this in the CIC, and may even take advantage of other broader efforts.
- InCommon Silver – Pursuing a higher level of certification through the InCommon Federation, a trust framework that enables collaboration and to which all CIC schools belong, will allow users to access shared digital resources more securely. In addition, management policies will be more refined, and represent a greater ability for CIC schools to collaborate.
Below is a list of software applications already successfully federated in the CIC:
- CICme - The CIC's collaboration tool to support peer group and internal activities was the first to be federated. It imvolved all CIC schools but without any campus-specific resources making it an ideal test case for federation in the CIC.
- MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) Project - MONK is a digital environment for humanities scholars developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. MONK is being shared via federating identity with all CIC universities through a collaboration of the Library Directors. Already the software is accessible to faculty, staff and students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, University of Iowa and University of Michigan. MONK will soon be federated at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ohio State University and ultimately the entire CIC.