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| Title | eduGAIN Federated Service Catalog |
|---|---|
| Description | At the moment, the only way you get an overview of services in eduGAIN is via metadata. While this is how the system is designed to work (machine to machine), service info is also interesting to humans e.g. to browse, to know if an SP already exists etc. A preliminary WG is starting in REFEDs to look at how service catalogs could be built. An eduGAIN level catalog should build on that work and also integrate with other relevant catalogs e.g open science cloud, NREN's own catalogs etc. |
| Proposer | Ann Harding |
| Resource requirements | Standardisation/spec via refeds Prototype implemention for aggregation. Protoype implementation for federation level infra. Pilot. |
| +1's | Wolfgang Pempe (DFN): encourage cross-federation support for mdui:Keywords. SURFnet: no catalog will survive if the (meta)data is not/cannot be maintained or is not of sufficient quality. I think therefore we need to address the root cause (as well). How prevent keeping a shadow "metadata" registry for this? SIR/RedIRIS: We are developing such a service catalog for our federation now, and am interested in this. Also, agree with Wolfgang, and SURFnet... regarding the SURFnet question, the catalog could have both "static" (collaborative information, with the possibility of letting the providers administrate its own information) and "dynamically gathered" information (from metadata) for a certain entity in the catalog. |
| Title | Storing History and Evolution of Metadata in a Distributed Ledger |
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| Description | The aggregated metadata of eduGAIN is under constant change as entities get added, removed, or changed. While daily backups are made, there is no event-based changelog and no trace of which change was made when. When an entry of interest is examined, the search for the exact event timestamps of changes pertaining to that entry are tedious by searching old copies of the entity database manually. The proposed system stores any change to the metadata aggregate one-by-one in a ledger as soon as it happens. That way, even intra-day changes (between daily database backups) can be observed and a "rewind" of the entity list to specific point in time becomes simple. For improved traceability of any changes, the ledger can be made distributed and authenticated in the way that both the publishing eduGAIN participant (sending side) and the eduGAIN OT (receiving side) both sign the change in a distributed ledger. The ledger would be distributed so that each eduGAIN federation maintains a copy. With that, changes made automatically synchronise between federations and a manual polling of per-participant feeds (by eduGAIN OT) as well as a periodic download of the aggregate (by eduGAIN participants) becomes superfluous. eduGAIN OT still maintains its role as metadata policy verifier by signing only such changes in metadata which result in eduGAIN policy conformant metadata. As a positive side-effect, this changes the granularity of metadata rejection from a per-participant (country-wide) effect to a per-entity effect, reducing outages due to metadata of entire participant federations vanishing. The solution developed here is not limited to eduGAIN exclusively; it can also be used inside a federation to collect and sign individual pieces of metadata, thereby assembling its own metadata set in the same way. Where IdPs or SP choose to maintain a copy of the ledger, they can immediately and in real-time see any changes and implement them in their entity; resulting in an experience similar to the MDX proposal above. They can choose to incorporate only entries signed by their own federation, or a superset to their liking. |
| Proposer | Stefan Winter (RESTENA) |
| Resource Requirements | VMs, storage for the ledger, a blockchain implementation, someone to work on that so it fits our needs |
| +1's |
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