Bringing order to the world of avatars

• Lack of persistence: When users leave an organisation, they lose their SWITCHaai login, meaning that they can no longer access any of the services they were previously using. This is extremely tiresome with regard to services that are tied to the individual and not dependent on membership of the organisation (see article "Less hassle, less effort").
• Lack of user orientation: Users who change to a new organisation – or sometimes to a new role within the same organisation – have their old account deleted and receive a new one. They are no longer recognised by the services they used to use, and they no longer have access to their old working environment.
• Problems with non-members: Only members of an organisation that participates in SWITCHaai can access the resources protected with it. When the organisation works with external users, its administrators must enter them separately or ensure that additional digital identities are supported.
• Lack of flexibility on quality: Self-declared user attributes are sufficient for some applications, but others have stricter requirements. SWITCHaai only supports one level of quality.
• Poor support of mobile environments and applications in the non-web space: SWITCHaai only supports web interfaces. There is no provision for others.

The Swiss edu-ID is designed to work as follows:

Users can enter their own basic data. Anyone who already has a SWITCHaai login can convert it into a Swiss edu-ID (see article "Your folder for life"). The basic data are stored by the identity provider, which in this case is SWITCH. Attributes referenced therein, for example those relating to authorisations, are controlled by the individual institutions, which must verify them and make them available in the required quality.

IT administrators save a lot of time and effort

The institutions can access the basic data via compatible interfaces. This saves their IT administrators a lot of time and effort and also helps them to avoid unwanted duplication (see article "Less hassle, less effort").

The creation of the Swiss edu-ID is leading to a complex situation as regards data protection. Federal law and cantonal rules apply. SWITCH is working to clarify the legal aspects and take account of them in its development efforts (see article "Right to be forgotten and lifetime data retention").

The Swiss edu-ID will play a vital role for the academic community going forward. It is strongly favoured by swissuniversities in the context of its programme P-2 "Scientific information: access, processing and safeguarding" (see article "Empowering Swiss research"). The idea at the heart of P-2 is that certain services will be offered to universities on a centralised basis so that they do not need to expend resources on their own solutions. This simply cannot happen without a shared digital identity.

This article appeared in the SWITCH Journal October 2015.