AARC Blueprint Architecture (BPA)
The purpose of the AARC Blueprint Architecture (BPA) is to provide set of interoperable architectural building blocks for software architects and technical decision makers, who are designing and implementing access management solutions for international research collaborations.
High-level Objectives
focus on the integration aspects of the blueprint architecture
provide recommendations and guidelines for implementers, service providers and infrastructure operators on implementing scalable and interoperable AAIs across e-infrastructures and scientific communities
work in close collaboration with the policy, pilots, and the training and outreach activities of AARC2
work on the evolution of the blueprint architecture, with a focus on identity provider / service provider (IdP/SP) proxies, scalable authorisation solutions for multi-service provider environments and other solutions for integrating with R&E federations and cross-sector AAIs
Documents
| ID | Title | Summary | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| AARC-JRA1.4A | Guidelines on expressing group membership and role information | Information about the groups a user is a member of is commonly used by SPs to authorise user access to protected resources. Apart from the group information that is managed by the user’s home IdP, research communities usually operate their own group managing services. Such services often act as Attribute Authorities, maintaining additional information about the users, including VO membership, group membership within VOs, as well as user roles. It is therefore necessary that all involved SPs and IdPs/AAs can interpret this information in a uniform way. Specifically, the following challenges are addressed by this document:
| AARC-JRA1.4A (201710) [PDF] Older versions AARC-JRA1.4A (1.0) [PDF] |
| AARC-JRA1.4B | Guidelines on attribute aggregation | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4C | Guidelines on token translation services | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4D | Guidelines on credential delegation | ||
AARC-JRA1.4E | Best practices for managing authorisation | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4F | Guidelines on non-browser access | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4G | Guidelines for implementing SAML authentication proxies for social media identity providers | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4H | Account linking and LoA elevation use cases and common practices for international research collaboration | ||
| AARC-JRA1.4I | Best practices and recommendations for attribute translation from federated authentication to X.509 credentials | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.1A | Guideline on the exchange of specific assurance information between Infrastructures | Increasingly Research Infrastructures and generic e-Infrastructures compose an 'effective' assurance profile derived from several sources. The assurance elements may come from an institutional identity provider (IdP), from community-provided information sources, from step-up authentication services, and from controls placed upon the user, the community, or the Infrastructure Proxy through either policy or technical enforcement. Knowledge about the upstream source of either identity or authenticator can also influence the risk perception of the Infrastructure and result in a modification of the assurance level, e.g. because it has involved a social identity provider or perhaps a government e-ID. The granularity of this composite assurance profile is attuned to the risk assessment specific to the Infrastructure or Infrastructures, and is often both more fine-grained and more specific than what can reasonably be expressed by generic IdPs or consumed by generic service providers. Yet it is desirable to exchange as complete as possible the assurance assertion obtained between Infrastructures, so that assurance elements need not be re-asserted or re-computed by a recipient Infrastructure or Infrastructure service provider. This document describes the assurance profiles that are recommended to be used by the e-Infrastructures and research infrastructures AAI platforms to exchange user authentication information between infrastructures. | Wiki |
| AARC2-JRA1.1B | Guidelines for the discovery of authoritative attribute providers across different operational domains | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.1C | Guidelines for handling user registration and user consent for releasing attributes across different operational domains | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.1D | Guidelines for federated access to non-web services across different operational domains | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.1F | Guidelines for uniquely identifying users across infrastructures | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.2A | Guidelines for scalable and consistent authorisation across multi-SP environments | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.2B | Requirements and guidelines for SPs using alternative mechanisms and protocols for federated access → OIDC Based Services in research | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.2C | Step-up authentication requirements and guidelines for SPs | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.3A | Guidelines for account linking & LoA elevation in cross-sector AAIs | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.3B | Guidelines for registering OIDC Relying Parties in AAIs for international research collaboration | Wiki | |
| AARC2-JRA1.3C | Guidelines for AAI interoperability with non-R&E Identity Providers in support of international research collaboration | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.3D | Guidelines for AAI interoperability with eIDAS Identity Providers in support of international research collaboration | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.3E | AAI tools & technologies enabling OIDC for international research collaboration | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.4A | Roles, responsibilities and security considerations for VOs | Virtual Organisations (VOs) have several roles and responsibilities; some are identified as community responsibilities, and others arise from relations to infrastructures (e.g. security contact, technical contact). The purpose of this document is to identify how these roles can technically be supported on the infrastructure, investigate how they scale, and to make recommendations to the infrastructure architects how to best support these role/attributes. | Wiki |
| AARC2-JRA1.4B | Guidelines for combining group membership and role information in multi-AA environments | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.4C | Guidelines for scalable account (de)provisioning of VO members | ||
| AARC2-JRA1.4D | Guidelines for implementing, operating and using VO platforms |