The EGI AAI Check-In service for scientific communities

The EGI Check-in service (also called EGI AAI proxy) enables access to EGI services and resources using federated authentication mechanisms. Specifically, the proxy service is operated as a central hub between federated Identity Providers (IdPs) residing ‘outside’ of the EGI ecosystem, and Service Providers (SPs) that are part of EGI. The main advantage of this design principle is that all entities need to establish and maintain technical and trust relation only to a single entity, the EGI AAI proxy, instead of managing many-to-many relationships. In this context, the proxy acts as a Service Provider towards the Identity Providers and as an Identity Provider towards the Service Providers.

Through the EGI AAI proxy, users are able to authenticate with the credentials provided by the IdP of their Home Organisation (e.g. via eduGAIN), as well as using social identity providers, or other selected external identity providers (support for eGOV IDs is also foreseen). To achieve this, the EGI AAI has built-in support for SAML, OpenID Connect and OAuth2 providers and already enables user logins through Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and ORCID. In addition to serving as an authentication proxy, the EGI AAI provides a central Discovery Service (Where Are You From – WAYF) for users to select their preferred IdP.

The EGI AAI proxy is also responsible for aggregating user attributes originating from various authoritative sources (IdPs and attribute provider services) and delivering them to the connected EGI service providers in a harmonised and transparent way. Service Providers can use the received attributes for authorisation purposes, i.e. determining the resources the user has access to.