AAF at APAN59

AAF's Head of Support, Terry Smith, and Senior Technical Support Analyst, Dalia Abraham, will be attending the upcoming 59th Meeting of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN), in Yokohama, Japan, from March 3 – 7.

APAN represents member institutions, network connecting member countries and regions to each other and to other international research and education networks. APAN coordinates activities related to network technology, services, and applications among its member institutions and with other international organisations.

The network is also an important facilitator of network-enabled research and education activities such as research collaboration, knowledge discovery and sharing, telemedicine, and natural disaster mitigation.

APAN meetings provide a valuable platform for researchers and technical experts from various countries to exchange their insights and establish partnerships for future endeavours. APAN59 will feature various workshops, tutorials, presentations, panel discussions and an academic conference covering advanced network technologies and applications.

Terry Smith, AAF's Head of Support, will be presenting at APAN59 at the following sessions:

Introduction for Identity Federations

• This session will introduce identity federations, investigate their benefits, uses, technologies and policies. Identity federations provide multilateral arrangements that allow campuses to take advantage of the identity infrastructure and possibly of services offered at other institutions.

Introduction to SIRTFI

• Sirtfi is a means to enable a coordinated response to a security incident in a federated context. It defines a modest set of security protections for federated entities and a standard means of publishing security contact information for them. This presentation will discuss what Sirtfi is, the participants and their roles and how it benefits the global federation space.

Identity Federation updates

• This session provides NRENs across the Asia Pacific region the opportunity highlight activities and advancements that have occurred with their identity federation deployments, sharing successes and wins as well as issues that are impacting the growth and sustainability of their federations.

Identity Federation Topics

• Topics of interest to federation operators that will impact the future viability of your federation.
• Improving users Identity Assurance when accessing federated services. How really "knowing your researcher" is becoming ever more important.
• Improving the performance of your federation.
• Options for connecting service providers to your federation.

ORCID and PIDs Presentations and discussion

• This session will deliver presentations on ORCID and PIDs.
• PIDs – An Introduction by Dalia Abraham from Australian Access Federation
• PIDs and NRENs: ORCID in the Landscape by Chieh-Chih Estelle Cheng from ORCID
• Beyond identity: NRENS serving as ORCID community representatives by Brian Minihan from ORCID
• This session will conclude with a PIDs discussion focusing on how your NREN can begin a PIDs program to enhance research in your nation.

Connecting a Service to eduGAIN

• This hands on training session will guide participants through the steps to required to connect a service to eduGAIN enabling it to be accessed by potentially millions of researchers, academics and students globally.

AAF's Terry Smith chairs the APAN Identity and Access Management (IAM) Working Group, which focuses on generating awareness and understanding of IAM. The IAM Working group continues to promote the use of identity federations and benefits of increased security, ease of use and improved collaboration opportunities across the region particularly targeting regions that have yet to begin their identity journey.

We look forward to continuing to share our expertise with the APAN community at upcoming 2025 meetings.

To learn more about APAN59, and view the full schedule, please visit https://apan59.apan.net/