ARN Identity Federation (ARNaai), is a cross-border/cross-domain federation introduced to facilitate, simplify and promote the use and the adoption of shared e-Research services. Additionally, the ARNaai federation is meant to be an open identity infrastructure for its members to introduce new technologies and policies related to federated authentication and authorisation.
The Federation is managed by the Algerian Research Network (www.arn.dz).
ARN Identity Federation comprises members from ARN community (education, research and technological entities) and third-party organizations (i.e. publishers, software /service providers or others), in case they provide relevant contents or services to ARN community.
They belong to the following categories:
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- Identity Providers (IdP): the entities from ARN community authenticating their users and certifying their identities.
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- Service Providers (SP): the entities providing services to the federation. They may receive individual users' personal data, under consent, with the purpose of authentication and provision of personalized services.
The participation of an Identity Provider to ARNaai provides multiple benefits to its users:
- logging into a federated service is performed using the user's existing institutional account, without requiring separate authenticaiton;
- the user's identity, position and affiliation are only optionally transmitted to Service Providers, allowing fully anonymous and trusted access.
Accordingly, a Service Provider may benefit from joining ARNaai by being able to offer services to a large community through a central access mechanism without the need for "ad hoc" user authentication methods.