eduGAIN connects about 27 million students, researchers and teachers around the world. Learn about some services and the advantages of membership.
eduGAIN. Boosting universal access.
This service, which has just celebrated 10 years of existence, helps more than 27 million students, researchers and teachers around the world to access online services, minimising the number of accounts that users need to manage - reducing costs, complexity and security risks.
More than 70 federations worldwide participate in this initiative that simplifies access to services, resources and content for the entire education and research community. All this, through a single login.
For organisations and users wanting to access or share data and services, joining eduGAIN offers several benefits. From a service perspective, eduGAIN offers the ability to access users from around the world and reduces costs and complexity in integration as the service does not have to perform user credential management. For institutions, it offers more services to their users and reduces the need for individual agreements. In turn, users benefit from secure and simple access to services from other federations using only their institutional account.
Learn about 5 eduGAIN services
In practical terms, joining eduGAIN means extending the range of services available. Thus, in addition to the RCTS services, member institutions can rely on additional services. Here are some examples.
#1
RCTS Certificates is the service that ensures the supply of various types of digital certificates to entities belonging to RCTS. The Unit FCCN guarantees this service through the TCS (Trusted Certificate Service), provided by the GÉANT Association.
To issue and manage these certificates, Sectigo provides a single portal with authentication via eduGAIN. When issuing personal certificates, this portal has the particularity of allowing the possibility of identifying the user as an element of an institution. This way, these certificates allow signing and encrypting emails.
#2
The project MyAcademicID was set up as part of the European Student Card Initiative, which aims to enable all students to easily and securely identify and enrol electronically in any European higher education institution. To ensure this goal, the European Commission has established a digitisation path for all services related to the Erasmus+ programme. In this framework, the MyAcademicID project currently provides an identity and access management platform combining eIDAS and eduGAIN for authentication in services related to the Erasmus+ programme(Erasmus+ App or Online Learning Agreement).
#3
eduTEAMS is a service provided by GÉANT for small and medium-sized communities that want to access and share data or services securely, without having to deal with the complexity of operating their own AAI(Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure). It supports multiple communities on the same platform and provides the tools needed to collaborate securely and use the services available for the GÉANT community and theEuropean Open Science Cloud.
#4
InAcademia provides commercial services with a reliable and fast mechanism to verify the user as a student, returning "Yes" or "No", without the need to exchange personal data, reducing the risk and cost of setting up the services. It is a low-cost and easy to implement service, which provides extremely fast (does not rely on institutional email verification) and totally secure validation. InAcademia uses eduGAIN as the basis for its authentication process and affiliation verification.
#5 CYCLADES
Cyclades is a cloud service, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) developed by the Greek NREN (National Research and Education Network) - GRNET. This infrastructure allows the creation of on-demand virtual machines through a web interface. Any user from an institution participating in eduGAIN can access and use the platform.
Institutions interested in accessing eduGAIN must be a Member of the Science, Technology and Society Network Identity Federation (RCTS). For more information, see how you can be a federated member.
To learn about other included services and get more information visit the RCTSaai/eduGAIN services page.
