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Terena Networking Conference concludes in Malaga

The Terena Networking Conference concluded in Malaga recently, while the focus this year was on environmental awareness, there were some key take aways from the federated standpoint.

1. Web-based Single-Sign-On is not enough
Established federations are now looking to capitalise on the federations that they've built, by extending their usage to non-web based services. While this is nothing new, the momentum is growing in this area, a look at the various project strands in Géant 3 is evidence of this. One intresting presentation at TNC by Rok Papez showed how SAML and Kerberos can be integrated together to gain access to Kerberos resources, such as SSH and IMAP sessions.

2. Users are more protective of their institutional credentails than their own personal information, as John Paschould of LSE's project flame demonstrated by enticeing students to provide informatioon in return for chocolate!

3. Interfederation/Confederation is just around the corner.
While it has always been envisaged that the use of federated access will someday take users beyond their national federation, it is now evident that this is happening. Projects such as eduGAIN (GN2) have delivered the infrastrucure to enable confederation, while interfederation is now occuring in the Scandanavian countries (Kalmar) in Europe, and also between federations the UK, Australia and the US. National borders are not the only boundary of federations, sometimes there may be multiple federations within ones border, and this again raises the interfederation question.

Videos and slides of the event are available from http://tnc2009.terena.org

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