This document discusses OpenAthens, a federated access management system. It provides an overview of OpenAthens' history since 1995, its clients in various sectors including academic, commercial, health and government. It then discusses how federated access management works using SAML/Shibboleth to enable access to resources while maintaining user accountability. It also notes how OpenAthens provides identity and discovery services to help institutions and content providers implement federated access management.

1. www.openathens.org
Phil Leahy – OpenAthens

2. • OpenAthens track record
• The access management toolkit
• How federated access management works
• Where does Shibboleth/SAML come in?
• Q&A

3. • OpenAthens track record
• Athens started in 1995
• “Athens was the first implementation of
federated login” – NISO 2011
• Now specialise in connecting different
technologies to SAML federations

6. Academic Commercial Health Government Public Libraries
Georgia
Institute of
Technology
AkzoNobel
UK National
Health Service
UK
Parliament
SWAN Consortium
(IL)
Georgetown
University
Medical Center
Google
Dubai Health
Authority
Department
of Veterans
Affairs
Cooperative
Information
Network (ID)
Punjab
Technical
University
Philips
New South Wales
Health
Ontario
Ministry of
Environment
Houston Area
Library
Automated
Network
Universidad
Tecnologica De
Chile
Royal Dutch
Shell
OSAKIDETZA
(Spain)
US Air Force,
Army & Navy
National Library of
Scotland

7. • Vendor-supplied credentials
• Referral URLs
• Peer-to-peer SAML connections
• IP recognition
• Federated access management

8. In working with a variety of publishers, partners, customers,
and libraries, we frequently see access to research resources
provided to members as a benefit of their affiliation. Part of
this arrangement is typically that the institution or library will
want to use their membership database to provide access to
these resources. IP recognition simply doesn’t work in these
situations.
Timothy Lull, VP of Sales, Software as a Service,
EBSCO Information Services
(OpenAthens 2016 white paper: Approaches to authentication: the importance of
information security)

9. Standard processes to enable access to:
• Desktop or cloud office applications
• Network drives (filestores etc.)
• VLE and/or LMS
• Discovery tools
• Printer
• …and subscription content

10. OpenAthens
Cloud
Discovery (Where Are You From?)
Click login
OpenID
Connect
Username
Password
SAMLOIDC
Adams College
Publisher User organisation Login:
Publisher’s
content

11. • Commonly used in federated access
management
• UK adoption started in 2006
• Different take-up rates in UK and US?
• Public investment in the UK
• Personalisation

12. www.cni.org/authentication-survey-2016
Slightly over half of all respondents had implemented
Shibboleth, with larger universities outnumbering smaller
ones by about two to one. However, very few reported that
they were using Shibboleth for content resources; most of
the applications were in other areas. Even those using it
for content resources said that it was only used very
selectively.
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information, 2016

13. IP recognition Federated access management
Identifies only the organisation
Identifies the organisation,
departments, individual users
Cannot identify offenders who
breach license terms
User accountability for license
breaches
No meaningful statistics
Categorized statistics, insight into
user behaviour
Have to maintain a list of IP
addresses with every supplier
Independent of location
Remote access requires VPN or
additional proxy
Federated access management
only needs a browser
Personalisation either non-
existent or requires separate
registration
Personalisation linked to the user’s
login – no separate profile required

14. • OpenAthens Identity
• For institutions
• OpenAthens Cloud
• For content providers
• Wayfinder – the OpenAthens discovery
service

17. • Benefit from SAML without installing it
• OpenAthens Cloud offers the same benefits
• OpenID Connect is the hook…
• …but what is OpenID Connect?

21. www.openathens.org
Phil Leahy
OpenAthens Service Relationship Manager
phil.leahy@eduserv.org.uk
+44 (0)1225 474302
www.openathens.org
docs.openathens.net