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GÉANT2 Research Project Participant Receives Award

The innovation of the GÉANT2 research project, eduGAIN, which allows the secure sharing of identity data, has been highlighted by the recognition of one its major components, known as SimpleSAMLphp, at the Identity Deployment of the Year Awards (IDDY) 2008. The prestigious IDDY awards, held in September in Anaheim, California, recognise the best enterprise and user-driven identity-enabled applications in the global marketplace today.

eduGAIN is a GÉANT2 research activity that enables the safe, secure transfer of authentication and authorisation data between federations and allows the user seamless access to information wherever they are. This research is working towards establishing boundary-free access across the European research area, where the multiple regional research and education networks and the high bandwidth backbone network, GÉANT2, all act as a seamless resource. In order to make this possible, interoperable systems for roaming, for verifying users' identities and associated rights or privileges (authentication), and granting access to resources (authorisation), are required, both in the network and at the service level.

A component of eduGAIN, SimpleSAMLphp, is a joint research project between the Norwegian national research and education network, UNINETT and the pan-European research and education network, GÉANT2. It was initiated and developed by UNINETT through the GÉANT2 programme and as a successful open source project, several external parties have contributed to improve the software. SimpleSAMLphp is a platform for quick implementation of emerging standards or identity-enabled proof-of concept (POC) applications. It is available in 15 languages and is designed to be easily installed, requires no configuration and will run on any operating system. SimpleSAMLphp received the Emerging Application IDDY Award at this year's event. All IDDY Award nominations are evaluated based on criteria that include the benefits the applications deliver to users and organisations and how the solution may successfully address identity issues such as reducing identity theft, meeting regulatory requirements or providing users with increased security and privacy protection.



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