A secure, persistent and privacy preserving link shortener for research and education

Link shorteners reduce a lengthy URL on the internet to something short and snappy, and sometimes easy to remember. As such it is a very well used and liked functionality within our community.

Many ‘free’ link shorteners exist, however, their free nature comes with a number of challenges, including:

• serving advertisements during the creation of the link, or when a link is followed and
• placing all kinds of tracking and fingerprinting, in that way data mining the users and their interests.

Next to these practices, some more general challenges exist with link shorteners, which are especially challenging for our sector:

• Many free link shorteners have a limited lifetime for the links they present. This leads to links being lost, or in some cases links being reassigned to different content. This lifetime is especially challenging in cases where the link shortener was used to reference scientific articles, where the intent is to long term preserve the relation between the article and the references. 
• Due to its proxy like nature, it is impossible to known where the link will actually lead. This makes link shorteners very ‘interesting’ tools to lure people into selecting links that lead to e.g. malware.
• Branding and policies of the free link shortener may not align well with the values of the institution the user is representing.

Taking into account the above considerations, SURF developed a new service called “edu.nl”. Grown out of a ‘Friday afternoon’ project, the edu.nl link shortener service was launched in The Netherlands in Oct 2019 to see its popular rise sharply in the two first months after it was moved from being a SURF staff only service to become a broadly available community service. Figure 1 shows some of the user statistics over the past few months. Since its launch over XXX k links were registered.Figure 1: edu.nl usage in The NetherlandsThe software supporting edu.nl will be made available to the GÉANT community by SURF for the purpose of this project.

This incubator project seeks to enhance the capabilities of the existing edu.nl codebase and make them ready for purpose to deliver a service that could be operated for the benefit of the GÉANT community as a whole, branded as the eduLNK service.

The software supporting edu.nl will be made available to the GÉANT community by SURF for the purpose of this project.

The eduLNK service should offers Assuming the eduLNK service would offer a free to use service for end users in our community to resolve and mitigate some of the aforementioned issues:

• The By making the software available to GEANT project and teh NRENs, the service is to be operated by a trusted third party without a need to make a profit from operating the service. This removes the need for advertising or selling off personal data.
• The eduLNK service will actively protect and preserve end user privacy and limit the amount of personal data collected to the absolute minimum.
• By allowing only community members to create short links, the edulnk.org link shortener is much more trusted as compared to other link shorteners. Also, the eduLNK operator may act upon abuse and engage with the users institution to resolve such issue as part of its acceptable use policy.
• eduLNK will offer long lifetimes for links before they expire. While storing links for a long time will take some effort, it is noted that the price of storage are rather low.

#Please describe the goals of Activity, including what needs to be delivered, participants, the community(ies) that require a solution. Describe when the Activity is done and how to measure the success of it, in a SMART way. - delete this line after using the template#

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#How do data protection and privacy impact the Activity? Think about e.g. handling of personal data of users - delete this line after using the template#

This activity is completed is the following goals are met:

Enhancing the software:

• Make use of InAcademia community edition
• Actively filter out known dangerous links
  
• Supported miltiple languages
  
• Allow users to update / change links
• Allow institution to use eduLNK with their own domain and branding

#Please describe here the set of criteria that the product must meet in order to be considered finished. - delete this line after using the template#

Te software developed as part of this activity will be made available under an open source licence.

This activity will investigate if eduLNK may be offered as a GEANT service.

#How are the results of the Activity intended to be used? If this requires further engagement, can you describe how you intent to sustain it? - delete this line after using the template#

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A prototype of the eduLNK software was created and a public test instance was made available.

The following results were created by this activity:

• eduLNK source code
• eduLNK prototype
• Onboarding documentation
• New Idea Form

With the submission of the official new idea form, eduLNK may become a potential new service in the GÉANT project.