URAN Association

PEANO Federation and eduGAIN

PEANO Federation for Certifying Electronic Accounts (Identity Federation) for Science and Education is a consortium of organizations (legal entities) founded by URAN Association without the formation of a separate legal entity. URAN Association is the Federation Coordinator. The main goal of PEANO is facilitation of access to distributed electronic resources for the members of the Federation.

Beside the Coordinator, PEANO Federation is constituted by member organizations of two more types: Identity Providers and Service Providers.

• Identity Providers assure that owners of electronic accounts get access to the resources of the Service Providers. The authentication of such owners is based on a local personal electronic account issued by the Identity Provider, the authenticity of which the Identity Provider confirms to the Service Provider at each request for service. Identification data of electronic accounts issued by any PEANO Identity Provider is held valid by all members of PEANO.
   
• Service Providers own electronic resources (e.g. libraries, universities, computer centers, datacenters etc.) and allow holders of electronic accounts, the identity of which is confirmed by one of the Identity Providers of PEANO, to access them. Access is provided on the basis of electronic identification data. PEANO makes it possible for Service Providers to not process logins, passwords etc. by themselves: information necessary for such access to resources is provided to the Service Provider by the Identity Provider and is transferred inside PEANO in a secure format.

Through PEANO Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure, users of the Federation can receive services in a secure and confidential manner, by using only their institutional account by means of SSO (Single Sign-On) technology. This is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them. Thus, for access to the Service Providers, the end user does not need to remember additional or specific user names or passwords anymore. As long as he/she is a user of an affiliated organization - Identity Provider, he/she may apply via the federative connection and use services on the basis of his/her status within the home organization.

Any organization can be a Service Provider in PEANO. Membership in URAN Association is not necessary for a Service Provider. But only URAN Association and its members can serve as Identity Providers. URAN Association and its members can act both as Identity and Service Providers at the same time.

The PEANO Federation is participating in eduGAIN (Education and Global Authentication Infrastructure), the GÉANT inter-federation service that interconnects identity federations around the world, simplifying access to content, services and resources for the global research and education community.

See more at www.peano.uran.ua.