News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

University of Texas Campuses, Health Centers Join InCommon

ANN ARBOR, Mich - November 24, 2009 - Citing the opportunities for  
increased security, collaboration and single sign-on convenience, The  
University of Texas System has announced that its nine campuses, six  
medical centers and system office are all joining the InCommon  
Federation. The InCommon Federation provides the U.S. higher education  
and research community with the common framework for trustworthy  
access to on-line resources. InCommon provides improved security and  
privacy, as well as single sign-on convenience, and eliminates the  
need for researchers, students and educators to maintain multiple  
passwords and usernames.

This federated identity approach allows educational institutions and  
their partners to use already assigned college and university IDs for  
access to online resources. This improves privacy and security for the  
individuals and the institutions, and allows researchers, faculty and  
students to focus on their work rather than managing multiple user  
names and worrying about privacy. With the addition of the UT campuses  
and medical centers, InCommon now serves almost 4 million individuals  
at 181 participating institutions throughout the nation.

“The University of Texas System saw the opportunity to address more  
than one problem with InCommon and its technology,” said Clair  
Goldsmith, the system’s senior advisor for information technology.  
“First, UT has six health institutions involved in research,” he said.  
“These institutions need access to National Institutes of Health  
applications and to collaborate with institutions both within and  
without the UT System. Our medical centers, for example, use several  
applications that are available under the NIH Clinical Translational  
Science Awards and the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid. These  
applications are, by definition, collaborations involving multiple  
institutions. InCommon is the pathway to these.”

Goldsmith also cited single sign-on convenience across all UT  
institutions for all UT applications. He said that the use of InCommon  
and the underlying Shibboleth open-source software improves security:  
“The use of SAML and Shibboleth to access applications increases  
security by eliminating potential external attacks.”

SAML is the Security Assertion Markup Language developed as an open- 
source solution for collaboration. It forms the basis for the  
standards-based Shibboleth single sign-on and federating software that  
is used by institutions around the world. In using federated identity,  
participating identity providers (such as colleges and universities)  
and resource providers (such as the NIH) agree on a set of shared  
policies, trust-establishing processes and technology standards. This  
greatly streamlines collaboration among multiple organizations because  
federation members agree on these policies and processes once, rather  
than each time they sign a contract with a new partner.

“The University of Texas System sees InCommon as an essential  
strategic resource,” Goldsmith said. “It will enable students, faculty  
and staff to access, share and build collaborations across  
disciplines, institutions and geography.”

As an example, he said, “InCommon membership will extend resources,  
such as the national laboratories, to researchers at some UT  
institutions that are quite small and very remote, such as UT  
Brownsville. Many of these institutions, nevertheless, have  
researchers who qualify for and need access to these laboratories. In  
addition, InCommon membership will help graduate students locate  
specific resourses, such as tissue samples, from a much larger number  
of tissue banks than are otherwise available.”

According to Stanford University’s Lois Brooks, chair of the InCommon  
Steering Committee, “One of the primary goals of federations like  
InCommon is to allow universities like the University of Texas to  
provide access to a wide range of  on-campus and off-campus resources  
while still protecting the security and privacy of their students,  
faculty and staff. We welcome all of the campuses of the University of  
Texas, and the system office, to InCommon. Members from UT have  
already made valuable contributions to the federation and we look  
forward to an even closer relationship.”

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About the InCommon Federation

The InCommon Federation provides the U.S. higher education and  
research community with the common framework for trustworthy shared  
management of access to on-line resources and serves almost 4 million  
individuals at 181 participating organizations. InCommon facilitates  
the development of a community-based common trust fabric sufficient to  
enable participants to make appropriate decisions about the release of  
identity information and the control of access to protected online  
resources. InCommon is intended to enable production-level end-user  
access to a wide variety of protected resources. For more information,  
visit www.incommon.org.

***********

About The University of Texas System

The mission of The University of Texas System is to provide high- 
quality educational opportunities for the enhancement of the human  
resources of Texas, the nation and the world through intellectual and  
personal growth.  Established by the Texas Constitution in 1876, The  
University of Texas System consists of nine academic universities and  
six health institutions.
The System administration is based in Austin, Texas. Offices are also  
located in Midland, Texas, and Washington, D.C. These offices are  
responsible for the central management and coordination of the  
academic and health institutions.

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The new InCommon Participants:

University of Texas at Arlington
University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Brownsville

University of Texas at Dallas

University of Texas at El Paso

University of Texas at San Antonio

University of Texas at Tyler

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler

University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

University of Texas of the Permian Basin

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

University of Texas System

University of Texas-Pan American