If you are a research, commercial, or education Service Provider, depending on your level of experience, joining the InCommon federation can be an intimidating process.

By Jack Suess, Vice President of Information Technology and CIO, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

In 2000, UMBC was picked as one of ten institutions for a program named the Internet2 Early Adopters program. The aim of that program was to establish LDAP-based identity services and set up an Identity Management System.

As of June 15, InCommon Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation are officially in effect and are now reflected in the InCommon Participation Agreement, the legal and foundational document for InCommon trust.

Over the past few months, a group of diverse collaborators from the Internet2 community have been working on Collaborative Service Delivery Experiments and Proof of Concept (PoC) projects with the aim of helping to inform future Internet2 and regional network infrastructure investments.

The Campus Success Program (CSP) includes 10 schools working together to adopt one or more components of the TIER (Trust and Identity in Education and Research) identity management platform (InCommon, Shibboleth, COmanage, Grouper, midPoint, and others). To help facilitate their work, the campuses formed several working groups. This is an update on their activities.

The Campus Success Program (CSP) includes 10 schools working together to adopt one or more components of the TIER (Trust and Identity in Education and Research) identity management platform (InCommon, Shibboleth, COmanage, Grouper, midPoint, and others). 

The principle charge of the Attributes for Collaboration and Federation Working Group has been to examine the reasons for low participation in the Research and Scholarship Entity Category (R&S) and to provide recommendations on how to substantially raise participation from about 30% of InCommon members to 85% or more.

Earlier this year, we asked for your input and feedback on the InCommon Certificate Service in our annual survey.  Such feedback is critical to the success of the InCommon Certificate Service because it allows you — the higher education and research community — to drive the service in the directions that matter most.

The Internet2 Inclusivity Award is a scholarship that was established in 2014 by the Internet2 community as part of a larger effort to improve diversity and inclusion in the information technology field within research and education. Four scholarship recipients from this year's Global Summit meeting share their highlights in this blog post.

Work continues on the InCommon Federation Manager, the federation trust registry web application that InCommon Participants and staff use to manage federation metadata. This is a key piece of infrastructure for all InCommon Federation participants.

The InCommon Baseline Expectations for Identity Providers and Service Providers requires accurate metadata, including User Interface information, and a useful part of that is a logo that is meaningful to users.

InCommon's Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation includes a metadata requirement for a privacy policy URL. This has generated a fair number of questions and some uncertainty about what, exactly, the privacy policy should cover. 

In February 2018, InCommon operations started to send monthly metadata "health checks" to site administrators and those in the role of InCommon Exec. This is part of the process to help organizations meet the Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation.

Internet2 is partnering with Oracle + Dyn (formerly Zenedge) to offer cloud-based volumetric DDoS Mitigation Service.

Magreth Mushi, Ph.D., is the CEO of the Tanzania Education and Research Network and was one of two NSRC-Internet2 fellows who attended the 2018 Global Summit in San Diego. In this blog post, she shares her reflection and takeaway from participating in her first Internet2 meeting.

Paul Howell, Chief Cyberinfrastructure Security Officer at Internet2, discusses some of the security insights gleaned from syslog and how your organisation can incorporate security monitoring using syslog as a security operations practice.

A sneak peek of the upcoming Defense-In-Depth presentation that is part of the On the Campus Network: Cybersecurity for Research & Defense in Depth session at the 2018 Internet2 Global Summit in San Diego, California.

Internet2 offers a full solution for AWS Direct Connect. This includes Cloud Connect, allowing the user to reach locations where Direct Connect is available and with the NET+ AWS service.

A sneak peek of the upcoming Introducing Frogans: A New Medium on Top of the Internet presentation at the 2018 Internet2 Global Summit in San Diego, California.