JISC

Authentication and delivery across medical services using Shibboleth

St George's Hospital Medical School

The ADAMS project is setup to ensure that students, staff and collaborators throughout the country can access online medical and healthcare materials, without overburdening administrative/support services.

By allowing universities (other than our own) to access to these resources SGUL would need to set up the necessary authorisation. The current process would be time consuming and cumbersome, requiring every institution wishing to access our resources to send through the student details in order to gain access. If shibboleth is implemented at a national level, and the attributes are defined in a form that will allow universities access to resources at the necessary academic level (course, year, module) then we have the possibilities of a utilising the very best online resources throughout the country. At the same time it should prove to require minimal support work, provided necessary thought is put into the attributes used by the federations.

Aims and Objectives

The project is aimed at testing Shibboleth as a means of providing scalable authentication to allow secure delivery of core online teaching resources to any UK University and College involved with the provision of Medical and Healthcare courses. This will be used at a local level within our own university, as well as at a wider level with our Tri-partite agreement between ourselves, Kingston and Royal Holloway. As well as other partners at national and international level.

Our main aims are to ensure that the necessary attributes are setup to allow access to be tailored to specific targets groups, be they staff, student year/course groups. To investigate the way in which we will use shibboleth to access information held on national repositories and any large collections, some of which could well be in other early adopters projects.

Methodology

The project will be broken down to three stages.

1. Initial setup and implementation of Shibboleth. A basic working setup to establish Shibboleth running at our institution. It should allow us to use the WAYF service and log onto a collect of resources at our institution.
2. Look at developing the necessary attributes to allow students within the tri-partite alliance (St George’s, Royal Holloway and Kingston) to be able to log on at any University/location and access the resources targeted at the specific group.
3. Further develop Shibboleth to be able to access resources held on external/national projects. Look at the implications of medical resources, e-journals, ATHENS, and also how we currently work with the NHS.

The core areas seem to be the attributes and the release policy, so that we can get the necessary granularity of service to work with specific key groups of staff/students. As well as the attributes we need to develop the core surrounding technologies that need to be enabled to work with Shibboleth. A key area that we see we will need to develop is our LDAP lists.

Implications / Deliverables / Stakeholders

The project outcomes will be to successfully design, develop and integrate Shibboleth into the universities authorisation system. This can be broken down into the practical benefits of getting first hand experience in the implementation of a new UK wide authorisation system that can become an integral part of the universities i.t. system that is future proof and should enable us to easily exchange resources in the future. As well as the experience of developing Shibboleth we can help steer the attributes needed that will provide the necessary framework for highly specialised online resources that will further widen the appeal of studying in any of the UK’s HE establishments. We would also like to look at the wider picture and help establish other FE’s and HE’s in using Shibboleth.