9. User Registration and Authentication

Whilst registration and authentication for most EDINA services previously depended on use of the Athens Access Management System, JISC announced their intention to replace use of Athens with new devolved access management technology based on Shibboleth. Academic use of Athens remained funded through to 31 July 2008.

All of EDINA's services were converted to accept Shibboleth credentials for access control in line with the 31 July date. Apart from the technical issue of implementing this software, the main change entailed by this conversion exercise was a re-engineering of the licensing procedures for handling institutional subscriptions. Whereas in the past, this involved informing Athens of new subscriptions, and subsequently relying upon Athens Access Management to make authorisation decisions, under Shibboleth these authorisation decisions are now the responsibility of EDINA as the service provider. New database management procedures were developed to streamline the handling of this licensing information.

Institutions continuing to use Athens access EDINA services through OpenAthens, a gateway that presents the services with Shibboleth credentials. To accommodate training accounts and non-affiliated one-off users, EDINA has developed its own local IdP.

EDINA continued to be heavily involved in the deployment of Shibboleth within the UK. The SDSS team provided enrolment support, metadata management and detailed technical support to the members of the UK federation, which is managed by JANET (UK) (as described in section 12.2). The SDSS team maintain the UK federation website which is hosted on EDINA hardware.