Federated Single Sign-On Made Easy

The poster targets Libraries and federation operators with the aim to encourage collaboration on the set up of Federated Identity Management and Single Sign ON.

SSO is the only way to support researchers who need to access library resources, catalogues, repositories, articles and monographs, and increasingly research data, from many different locations.

With SSO libraries and publishers can benefit from better tailored contracts, improved access to statistical data, better ways to mitigate abuse.

Researchers and students can benefit from better customization of services, more control over their data easier access to resources.

More and more publishers mandate that libraries use Single Sign On (SSO) to access their resources, instead of IP-based authentication. More work in this area is needed to improve SSO user experience.

This trend is irreversible but the speed of change can be accelerated in various ways. Incentives for Service Providers can include making federated access a mandatory feature of major scientific publishing contracts.

The AARC project developed a Library toolkit offering access to three pilots to improve library experience with SSO. The AARC pilot with EZproxy showed how it would be possible to use one interface to the users to enable them to login in a federated manner, whilst the EXproxy is configured to support both IP-based authentication and SAML-based authentication.

Based on the AARC experience federations/NRENs could offer managed IdP solutions to support library users, and stimulate collaboration between federations and library consortia.

The AARC Libraries Toolkit: https://aarc-project.eu/libraries/