FOO - Federating Organizations Organization

Introduction to FOO

FOO has been formed to foster discussion intended to develop a body of real-world practice about federated administration. Periodic conference calls are held among a small group of senior IT architects from a variety of market sectors. Minutes from these calls are posted below for reference.

Federated administration has emerged as a promising new direction for interrealm trust models. However, the issues in actually deploying and supporting federations have not been broadly developed. There are major unexplored issues in both operations of federations (supporting the functional mechanisms, such as organization signing keys, interoperation of federations, etc.) and trust mechanisms for federations (establishing rules for local authentication, defining shared attributes, use of received attributes, trust across federations, subsets of federations, etc.). The factors affecting these issues range from the realities of creating nimble trust mechanisms to managing the complexities of the user interface. Through the FOO work, we hope to both define a fuller set of issues and identify possible approaches for addressing them.

The Internet2 interest in this topic stems from two related items. First, the higher education and research community is perhaps the primordial environment for interrealm collaboration and federation. Secondly, the Shibboleth project (see http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/) has brought us to the point where we are now creating a large-scale federated structure, and we need all the help we can get.

Currently, participation in FOO is by invitation only. If you are interested in further information, please contact foo-info@internet2.edu

Presentations

Minutes

Documents

Links