1. Real Life Solution, Real Life Problems: A-Select, An
Open Source Federated Identity Management
Solution
An Identity 1.0 story
Maarten Koopmans
SURFnet, maarten.koopmans@surfnet.nl
OASIS Adoption forum 2006

2. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
In the beginning…
Well, the 90’s: a chip card for higher
education.
It failed miserably.

3. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
… (2)
Tests with mobile phones and e-banking
(token based in NL).
Piggybacking in 2001-2.

4. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
Authentication middleware, 2002
Authentication middleware that could act as
a switch between multiple authentication
methods and added SSO as a bonus.

5. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select 1.0 Q4-2002
First lesson: choose your project name
carefully! Authentication selection.
We’ll just call it A-Select “for now”.

6. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
1.0 features
• SSO
• Multiple authentication methods
• Simple “Cross” mode, full identity shared
between domains
3 universities, 30.000 users.
They liked it. We invested.

7. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select in 2002

8. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select in 2002 (2)

9. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
The marketing dilemma
How do you get the other universities to use
this?
Encourage usage outside and within
higher-ed

10. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
The question then becomes:
Why don’t you use it?

11. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2002-3: versions 1.1 – 1.3
• Logging
• APIs and protocol improvements
• Better user database support
• More AuthSPs

12. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select in 2003

13. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2003: Build a community
• E-government chose A-Select, as did the
public libraries
• System integrators
• More universities.
Some 100.000 users in NL

14. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2004: Strengthen the community
• e-government becomes DigiD, keep them on
board
• Work together with libraries
• Add features:
– fail over
– more application integration components
Open standards are becoming very important with
Shibboleth and SAML, especially for higher
education

15. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2004: A-Select diffusion
Encourage usage via diffusion program: target
100,000 users by the end of 2006.
Result: >> 200,000 users in higher ed and more
are coming!
Activities:
• Documentation
• Integration components
• On site support
• Project consultancy

16. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2005: Towards a Federation
Release 1.4.1: integrating a lot of contributions
from the community, massive clean-up of the
codebase
Release 1.4.2: Adding a simple yet flexible
authorization engine and attribute acquisition
(using, CGI, SOAP, LDAP)

17. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select in 2005

18. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
A-Select in 2005

19. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2005: Digid more and more visible
First cities are using Digid as an A-Select
based IdP
First tests with online tax forms with Digid
as IdP

20. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
2006: Federation for real
Release 1.5: adds SAML 1.1 with
Shibboleth profiles. A-Select can act as
IdP for Shib-protected resources.
From 2007 onwards Digid mandatory for
online tax forms
Millions of users.

21. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
Federation in 2006
users identities central federation components resources
(SAML)
SAML

22. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
Winding down
• Apache style licensed
• 98% Java based code
• > 5 authN Methods
• Healthy market and community
• millions of users
• Incremental growth has paid of: from
authN to federation middleware
• Open source is a viable model for “NL as a
company”

23. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
What’s next
• 1.6
• WS-* support
• SAML 2.0 support
• A-Select starter kit (with Linux, reverse
proxy, ...)

24. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
Expanding internationally
Open standards important for collaboration!
Thank you, OASIS!

25. High-quality Internet for higher education and research
Questions / discussion
Maarten.Koopmans@surfnet.nl