About the Australian Access Federation
Australia’s trust and identity experts for research and education
The Australian Access Federation (AAF) is transforming Australia’s research, teaching, and learning communities by delivering innovative technology solutions and policy, that provide secure access to digital resources and infrastructure, across the entire ecosystem.
Established in 2009, the AAF is Australia’s identity federation and part of a global network of over 80 federations around the world. We are a vital part of the Australian eResearch infrastructure landscape enabling safe and secure exchange of information between education and research institutions both locally and internationally.
We enable secure connection and collaboration, between education and research institutions, by providing access to over 990 national and international services that support teaching, learning and research.
As experts in trust and identity, the national identity Federation we operate enables over 10.9M authentications annually. We are continuing to invest in the technological capability of the Federation and our cloud hosted platform now connects more than 80% of our subscribers.
The Federation is a combination of technology and policy, which offers a trust framework. It provides subscribers with a national single sign-on that allows individuals across many different organisations to collaborate and access online resources within a trusted environment.
By logging in via the AAF, end users can access a variety of services including file transfer, data storage, compute, collaboration tools and portals, scientific instrumentation, administrative systems, scholarly resources and teaching, learning and research resources.
Nationally and internationally engaged team
Trust and Identity
- Originating via a CAUDIT program of work, the AAF is a member of the The Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) – the peak body for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Higher Education and Research sectors.
- AAF is a founding partner of the Australasian Higher Education Cyber Security Service (AHECS) – a multi-skilled group of sector leaders in cybersecurity that include the AAF, AARNet, CAUDIT, AUSCERT and REANZ.
- AAF is a Member Federation of eduGAIN.
- AAF is a partner of the Digital Nexus Alliance (DNA) alongside partners ARDC, AARNet, NCI and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
- AAF is an associate of the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) – AAF’s Head of Support, Terry Smith, chairs the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Working Group.
- AAF is a member of the the Research and Education FEDerations group (REFEDS).
- Members of the AAF team regularly attend AARC TREE (Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration (AARC) Technical Revision to Enhance Effectiveness (TREE)) meetings.
- Members of the AAF team participate in National Earth and Environmental Sciences Facilities Forum (NEESFF) meetings.
- Members of the AAF team participate in Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) meetings.
Persistent Identifiers
- AAF’s CEO Heath Marks is an ORCID Board Director.
- AAF is a member of the international ORCID Consortia Interest Group
- AAF’s PIDs Engagement and Support Lead, Melroy Almeida, is a Crossref Ambassador
- AAF participates in Research Data Alliance (RDA) interest and working groups
- Members of the AAF team participate in the National PIDs Strategy Stakeholder Action Groups
- AAF’s PIDs Engagement and Support Lead, Melroy Almeida participates in the Identifiers for Instruments Australia (i4iOZ) Community of Practice
Managing federated access
The AAF enables seamless access to resources, lowering the effort and costs associated with federated identity management in each individual subscriber organisation. It also removes inter-organisational barriers to collaboration by enabling people to quickly and easily connect with electronic resources. Resource providers are also able to quickly and easily connect their services to over 1 million people connected to the AAF today.
Operating as a shared service, the growing AAF subscriber base encompasses many leading organisations in the research and education sector, these include:
- all Australian Universities
- CSIRO and other government research agencies as well as leading research support organisations
- national research infrastructures such as Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN), AURIN and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).
- organisations providing online products or services for teaching, learning and research.
We connect people to CERN, CSIRO, NIH (National Institutes of Health), Elsevier, Nectar Research Cloud, Clarivate and many other research services.
AAF is also the ORCID Consortium lead in Australia. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs.
Testimonials
``For Macquarie, AAF’s Rapid IdP product positively changed the way the organisation operates. With the Rapid IdP application, system admins can now spend more time on other business value initiatives.``Grant Sayer
Director of Infrastructure and Applications — Macquarie University
``The eduGAIN connection, provided by the AAF, is a vital service for an international collaboration like the MWA, making it simple for our team of global researchers to access data from the telescope.``Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt
Director — Curtin Institute for Computation & Director — Murchison Widefield Array
``A primary consideration for AURIN is FAIR data access in a safe and secure manner for its research community. This requires high-quality trusted security solutions, like the AAF to be in place.``Professor Stuart Barr
Director — AURIN (Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network)
``Pawsey is grateful for the opportunity to work with the AAF, developing new capabilities in Trust and Identity in Australia for High Performance Computing (HPC) Systems. Pawsey is leveraging the expertise of the AAF and our knowledge of the underlying technical HPC functionality to prototype and build the service integrations that will make this all possible.``Mark Gray
Head of Strategic Partnerships — Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
``One of our greatest challenges, is to connect and report on the impact our of distributed services. Through this Trust and Identity Pathfinder incubator, we are partnering with the AAF to investigate the tracking of our infrastructure through PIDs at The University of Queensland, UNSW Sydney, Monash University and the University of Adelaide.``Dr Lisa Yen
Chief Executive Officer — Microscopy Australia
Discover AAF projects and case studies
Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
AAF has partnered with the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre exploring options to provide seamless and secure access to their supercomputing service using federated identities.
The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is one of two Tier-1 high-performance computing facilities in Australia. Its primary function is to accelerate scientific research for the benefit of the nation. Pawsey’s service and expertise in supercomputing, data, cloud services and visualisation enables research across a variety of fields including astronomy, life sciences, medicine, energy, resources and artificial intelligence.
Pawsey’s supercomputing systems play a critical role, for a wide range of research disciplines and features as an important part of many researchers’ workflows. This Incubator will raise the security profile of Pawsey and provide a single user account across their ecosystem. The Pawsey Incubator is a foundational building block in trust and identity for national research infrastructure and plays a critical role in the implementation of trust and identity across the sector.
Microscopy Australia
AAF has partnered with Microscopy Australia exploring impact tracking through persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Microscopy Australia are a consortium of university-based microscopy facilities that more than 3,500 researchers across Australia use each year. They aim to empower Australian science and innovation by making advanced microscopes accessible to all researchers.
One of the greatest challenges in research is to connect and report on distributed services and this incubator explores how richer reporting, impact tracking and usage data can be provided through ORCID iDs and PIDs across national research infrastructure.
Contact the AAF
If you would like to discuss trust and identity for your organisation, please contact us.
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