Blog Posts
From the TIER Community Investor Council
Adoption Planning: Kicking the TIER Tires
The TIER Program Community is gearing up for campus adoption and inviting you to kick the tires and give us feedback on how we’re doing and what you think you’ll need for your local deployment. Get all the details in the blog post.
New TIER Adopter Resources Available
See which campuses are already “kicking the tires” on the new TIER Production Candidate release—and to find out about new TIER adopter resources. When it comes to downloading and testing, the more campuses that get involved the better.
COmanage Implementation News
Read this post to learn the plans for the Internet2 implementation of COmanage.
Core Identity Standard Moves to 90-Day Comment Period
Get the details on the NIST SP 800-63 identity standard, now being renamed “Digital Identity Guidelines,” which has entered a 90-day comment period.
Working Group Updates
TIER Security and Audit
The Security and Audit Working Group, led by Helen Patton (The Ohio State University) began a focused analysis of security testing of the TIER build pipeline and to ensure there is vulnerability testing including the VMs and Docker containers. The group also reviewed security work priorities for this year including best security practices in how campuses engage with TIER products.
TIER Data Structures and APIs
The TIER Data Structures and APIs working group, led by Keith Hazelton (University of Wisconsin-Madison), began development of Provisioning / De-Provisioning use cases and overall lifecycle management including request and approval based policies. The group also started the development and workflows for provisioning demonstrations planned for Global Summit.
The group also hosts the work being done on the TIER Grouper Deployment Guide, led by Bill Thompson (Lafayette College), where the recent work has focused on the refinement of terminology, use cases, and common types of groups such as basis groups (templates), organizational groups, reference groups, and application groups (specifying access control policy for a service).
TIER Entity Registry
The TIER Entity Registry Working group, led by Warren Curry (University of Florida), began work on the development of TIER Entity Registry APIs. The group also continued work developing a features analysis of commercial provisioning and entity management applications.
TIER Packaging
The TIER Packaging Working Group, led by Jim Jokl (University of Virginia), successfully provided a TIER Production Candidate Release in December. The group has initiated planning and testing for the next incremental TIER release including reviewing recommendations for the inclusion of minimal instrumentation. The group has progressed discussions regarding Shibboleth IdP configuration management and requirements for evaluating potential candidate platforms. CANARIE’s IdP installer has also been reviewed and is being considered as the basis for automation in future releases.
TIER Component Architects
The TIER Component Architects Group, led by Steve Zoppi (Internet2), works toward alignment of TIER Software Development processes and practices, including the common core of technology platforms and tools. Recent calls have focused on the inclusion of minimal instrumentation to provide a “TIER beacon” function to provide insight on how many institutions are testing TIER releases and how they may be utilizing the functionality. The group also is reviewing demonstrations planned for Global Summit and evaluating the potential adoption of consent-informed attribute release by TIER.
Check out the TIER Working Groups home page for all TIER working group news and information.
Key Internet2 identity initiatives are supported in part by National Science Foundation grants. For more information, see specific software sites.
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