Eduroam AU Now and Future
Eduroam is an important component of the federated identity landscape in Australian Higher Education and related Research institutions, with AARNet providing dedicated resources in order to ensure the service is reliable and easily usable from both member institution and end-user perspectives. AARNet has migrated the eduroam service from a "project" to a fully supported "service" with 24x7 monitoring via AARNet's NOC and dedicated service management. Eduroam uptake and increase in usage has been strong over the last few years, with a steady flow of support requests to AARNet from national and international roamers via member institutions and eduroam operators. This paper describes the current status and growth of AU Eduroam, the challenges to achieving "zero-effort" network connectivity via eduroam when visiting member institutions and the emerging strategy to address them, plans to adopt RadSec (transport of RADIUS over TCP with TLS), and the initial strategy and future plans for improving monitoring of eduroam across the AU federation.
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Neil Witheridge's Biography
Neil Witheridge is AARNet's Authentication and Authorisation Services Technical Manager. He has spent the last 7 years working in the area of federated identity for Australian Higher Education (HE). Neil was involved at Macquarie University in introducing Shibboleth into Australian HE, and in the establishment of the "MAMS Testbed Federation", the forerunner of the Australian Access Federation (AAF). Neil joined the Australian Research Collaboration (ARCS) as Authorisation Services Manager, which included participation in the Pilot AAF, and developing and implementing the strategy to migrate users from the testbed federation to the AAF. At ARCS, Neil gained experience with the Grid trust federation, in particular integrating AAF authentication with the Grid Security Infrastructure (via the International Grid Trust Federation's "Short Lived Credential Service" authentication profile). Neil's role in AARNet includes technical management of the AU Eduroam service, a participant of the international eduroam federation, with the goal of delivering "zero-effort network connectivity" for HE end-users when visiting eduroam participant institutions nationally and internationally. Neil has a BSc/BE(Elec) and MEngSc (Sydney), and Management (UOW) and IT/Software Development (Macquarie) postgrad qualifications. |
