06/07/2021

Security, Safety, SeamlessAccess

Privacy concerns are on the rise as ransomware attacks escalate

In the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers increasingly required remote access to their academic institutions, ranging from library resources to the data gathered by their research group or in the lab. These changes in access patterns – some of which are looking like they will be here to stay – call for privacy-preserving solutions that help researchers with off-campus access securely and easily.

Last year SeamlessAccess™, a joint initiative run by GÉANT, Internet2, NISO and STM, went into beta-mode. In light of the pandemic, that turned out to be very timely – as testified by implementers of the service seeing increases of 150 percent to 300 percent for this type of off-campus use. SeamlessAccess is based on federated identity management (FIM) and uses SAML as the underlying technology (Security Assertion Mark-up Language, an open standard designed for secure single sign-on). It offers a modern alternative to long-standing but less flexible and somewhat outmoded IP-based access solutions through a privacy-protecting, secure single sign-on service. Previous posts in The Scholarly Kitchen already gave an inside view on the benefits of federated access, shared data on huge growth in federated authentication at the start of the pandemic, and shone a light on the strategic benefits of identity management and federated authentication for scholarly publishers.

Recently, questions have been posed whether FIM and SAML are, in fact, as secure and privacy-safe as often claimed. In response, the project team behind SeamlessAccess explains why the answer is simply, “yes."

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.