JISC

The LICHEN proposal arose from existing work being undertaken by the project partners (Southampton, Bristol and Manchester) in the UKERNA Wireless Advisory Group (WAG) and Location Independent Networking (LIN) pilot. A focus of the WAG and the LIN pilot has been the (seamless) authentication of roaming wireless users at university locations through a process of RADIUS transport referrals to their home institutions.   Some of the grounding of this work came from a previous JISC project called MAWAA (Mobile Ad-hoc Wireless Authentication in Academia) carried out at Southampton. 

In the LICHEN project the team propose to extend and complement the work of the UKERNA Wireless Advisory Group and TERENA TF-Mobility (which is establishing a RADIUS-based hierarchy of trust for Location Independent Networking) by investigating and developing a generic system for managing and applying authorisation policy pertaining to resources accessed by users in different administrative domains. These users would typically be members of short-lived, distributed collaborations between multi-site – and often multi-disciplinary – groups.

Aims and Objectives

The main aim of LICHEN is to demonstrate that the LIN architecture being piloted (successfully to date) by UKERNA and a number of universities can be extended to embrace supporting access control and authentication for virtual organisations of collaborating users on a variety of applications that may themselves authenticate through RADIUS. 

The secondary aim is to investigate methods to have such authentication interoperate with Shibboleth. The primary specific objectives are to:

• identify the scenarios and applications that are typical of collaborative working environments (focusing on those that may involve the three partner sites)
• validate the technical feasibility of using the LIN RADIUS referral infrastructure for authentication for services for such virtual organisations
• through trial in such organisations establish feedback from users to assess the effectiveness of the approach
• investigate and evaluate potential methods for interoperability between LICHEN and Shibboleth.

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