UniTo IDEM

The University of Turin participates in the IDEM Federation (IDEntity Management for Federated Access).

IDEM is Italy’s first federation of Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (AAI), involving institutions from the scientific and academic community as well as service providers. Thanks to the IDEM Federation, in which our University participates, users can more easily access online resources made available by different organizations.

The main purpose of the IDEM Federation is to simplify and enhance the security of user identification and authorization for access to services.

UniTo’s participation in the Federation offers several advantages:

• for end users: a reduced number of passwords to remember and easier access to online resources, regardless of location
• for participating institutions: lower costs for user account management and for the development of new services, as well as greater control over authentication and authorization processes
• for service providers: reduced administrative workload for managing identities and credentials, and the opportunity to expand their user base.

With a traditional approach, access to a resource would require users to be registered with each service provider they wish to access, with all the disadvantages that come from having to deal with different authentication procedures, remember multiple passwords, and so on.

With the IdeM approach, instead, thanks to the creation of a federation among the organizations connected to the network, users can access multiple services through a standard authentication procedure and only need to remember a single username and password issued by their home organization.

Within the IDEM Federation, GARR acts as the coordinator, providing the central infrastructure and the IDEM GARR AAI services, and signing the federation participation agreements.

All Identity Providers that join IDEM automatically join eduGAIN, unless they explicitly request to be excluded (opt-out); all services (Service Providers) that join IDEM may join eduGAIN only upon explicit request (opt-in).