CAMP: Leveraging Campus Authentication Across Boundaries

At a brick-and-mortar institution serving on-campus faculty, staff, and students, the verification of individuals’ identities is relatively straightforward. Within our campus boundaries, we personally trust and verify our electronic community every day. Chances are we know the person (or know someone who does) since we ask for proof of identity and often have personal data, such as a home addresses and Social Security number, when he or she gets an account.

But what happens when a faculty member would like her research team to use a restricted research database managed by another organization? Or when a medical school student needs to take a class on the main campus? Or when a parent would like to pay her daughter’s tuition bill online? How does authentication occur in this context, where the individuals are unknown and have no identity information with which to be associated? How does authentication occur when the multiple identity management systems are not aware of each other?

CAMP: Leveraging Campus Authentication Across Boundaries will offer an overall understanding of the role, methods, and implementation considerations of authentication to support these increasingly complex electronic relationships. The program will include both management and technical tracks and case studies, including discussions on topics such as:

• What is a federation and why should an institution join one?
• How does PKI factor into this new environment?
• What are Levels of Assurance and how will they impact campuses?
• What is multifactor authentication?
• How will growing compliance requirements affect campus authentication infrastructures?
• How can services be shared with an autonomous academic medical center or research institute?
• What is the Federal E-Authentication Initiative and how should campuses prepare for it?

This workshop will offer education and guidance to higher education CIOs and IT managers, project managers, middleware architects, and administrative staff involved at a technical, management, or stakeholder level in supporting an enterprise authentication service. The sessions are focused on campuses with existing authentication systems which are also investigating or planning a business-to-business, interinstitutional, or other relationship requiring authentication across the boundary of their local identity management system. Attendees from state systems or regional consortia may be particularly interested in topics presented at this workshop.

Participants are encouraged to have a sound knowledge of authentication and identity management (IdM) to learn the most from the sessions. Those interested in knowing more about IdM can review the Enterprise Directory Implementation Roadmap. For more information on Authentication, refer to the Enterprise Authentication Implementation Roadmap.

A note to previous CAMP Enterprise Authentication Workshop attendees: If you attended the authentication workshop in November 2004 and are now considering interinstitutional relationships, consider attending this meeting.

CAMP is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative-Enterprise and Desktop Integration Technologies (NMI-EDIT) Consortium: EDUCAUSE and Internet2. Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation Cooperative Agreement NSF ANI-0123937 and ANI-0330626.

For more information on NMI-EDIT, please see their Web site.