UW-Madison and UC-Berkeley IAM Collaboration

I wrote in broad overview about Identity and Access Management in June, describing how Bamboo environments and services will delegate authentication (login, AuthN) responsibility to campus and selected social media identity providers.

This brief post is a follow-up to call attention to a collaboration being undertaken to prove and integrate the technology that will implement authentication and authorization in the Bamboo Ecosystem.

Keith Hazelton, Scott Fullerton, and Bruce Barton of U Wisconsin - Madison will host Steve Masover (that would be me) and Fernando Alvarez of UC Berkeley next week to kick off a joint effort to bootstrap these fundamental Phase One deliverables. Keith, as co-chair of the Internet2 MACE-Dir working group, brings his deep experience in AuthN/AuthZ to the effort. This puts us in a position not only to avoid reinventing the wheel, but to avoid rediscovering it. Keith's guidance has already proven quite valuable, as has his leadership, alongside Steve Carmody of Brown University, in convening and facilitating Internet2-hosted Social Identity discussions.

Following our face-to-face in Madison, we'll continue along the path charted by our work plan for the coming months, live on this wiki at the page: Project Bamboo Ecosystem Security Work Plan - BTP Phase One. As of this post's publication timestamp, elements of work have been posted and scheduled for piloting Bamboo's IAM technology infrastructure; this page will be filled in further over the coming weeks to describe implementation of the services APIs through which IAM functionality will be accessed in the Bamboo Ecosystem. As the work proceeds, these related efforts will converge, closing in on a functional IAM infrastructure for the ecosystem.

Keep an eye out for descriptions, diagrams, future blog posts, and progress that we'll track in the BTP's JIRA instance. We're very pleased that UW Madison has stepped forward to lend an experienced hand in this foundational area of work.