Guidelines for the evaluation and combination of the assurance of external identities (AARC-G031)

The Research Infrastructures (from now on just Infrastructures) that follow the AARC Blueprint Architecture  set up their own AAI to grant access to their services. The AAI is typically based on a central IdP-SP proxy that act as a gateway for the Infrastructure services and resources. In order to assign an identity to the users of the research collaboration or the community they serve, Infrastructures rely on external Identity Providers and employ identity linking strategies.

The Infrastructures also define one or more assurance profiles, or a combination of assurance components, tailored to a specific risk assessment.

In order to assign an assurance profile to a user, the Infrastructure shall evaluate the assurance components of the linked identity, or identities, used to register to the Infrastructure’s AAI or used during authentication at the infrastructure proxy. These guidelines provide a method to combine assurance information and to compensate for the lack of it.