HW090: Inside eduroam

Keith Parsons (0:02)

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Welcome back to another episode of Heavy Wireless, part of the Packet Pushers Podcast Network. My name is Keith Parsons, and today I have with me Mary Bull, and we're going to be talking about eduroam, Internet2, and all things about identity and Wi-Fi and federations. Mary, how are you doing?

Mary Bull (0:55)

I'm doing all right.

Keith Parsons (0:56)

Well, there's a lot of words and terminology. Maybe you can give us a little background on all of those. Eduroam, Federation, Internet2, where did all these pieces come from?

Mary Bull (1:09)

Yeah, I'll try to do that efficiently.

Eduroam was started in the higher ed and national research and education network context.

And it was originally started... Actually, next year is going to be the 20th anniversary of Eduroam officially. So started in the Netherlands and I think the original Eduroam network communicated between the Netherlands and England. And it's based on this idea that if you have a username and account credentials at one university, wouldn't it be cool if you could just join the Wi-Fi at any other university that you also went to? And this made sense to... It still makes sense to people who set up Eduroam at their university or at their research institution, because people in this space tend to go to the same kinds of locations. Grad students travel, professors travel for research, undergrads travel for study abroad or summer programs. So it really is designed to save people in the research and education community a lot of trouble, because they don't have to figure out how to connect at different locations. They just connect automatically.

It works through an identity federation. So National Research and Education Networks pioneered these ideas of setting up common exchanges or in the case of Eduroam, we have these national servers, federation servers, that every university, every Eduroam subscriber configures their networks to communicate with these federation servers. That means that if Harvard is connected to the federation, they don't have to know about every other school that's connected to the federation. They just need to know and trust the federation server. And then the authentications are proxied through these federation servers. If someone with Harvard credentials goes to Oxford in England, we handle all that connection in the background. So they join the Wi-Fi at Oxford. They see the edge of the MSS ID that that user's device, see the edge of the MSS ID. Their identity is proxied through radius, secured in an e-total, back to Harvard. It connects to Harvard's identity provider. And then Harvard's identity provider just responds back with a yes or no. So, what we do on the Edge of Rome Federation server is really very simple. We're just proxying back these yes or the no's, like who's allowed to connect, and we know who is a subscriber. So, we have the verified contacts of all of the subscribers for each nation. But these are kind of handled in a hierarchy where in the US, we run a set of Edge, we run EdgeRome proxy that handles all the US subscribers. When someone's roaming outside the US or between international institutions, we pass those on to servers that are kind of triple homed in the world, but they're run primarily out of SERF and another ones, it's another National Research and Education Network. And then they're kind of handling things. So, EdgeRome is in over 100 countries in the world.

Keith Parsons (4:30)

And in lots of public places as well. In the state of Utah, we also have it at our K12, which is kind of convenient.

You work for a company named Internet2. What's the history of Internet2? And was there an Internet1?

Mary Bull (4:44)

I think you get the feeling that that name is very much from the 90s.

I've never figured out for sure why they picked the two, but there were some earlier National Research and Education organizations. I don't know the total history on that, but there were earlier backbone networks, but Internet2 came along in the late 90s to be the ones who ran this national backbone network in the US that connects to research and education institutions. So most are one universities, many are direct members of Internet2, often through their research and education network in their state. Like in Utah, you have UETN, and even the K-12 who are connected to Edge Room, they also do that under the auspices of UETN. So there's a lot of, and some friends of WLPC and wireless folks, like Mark Houts are also associated with UETN. So these regional education networks really become, and Internet2 is the national version of that. They're hybrids of, officially they're non-profits. They do make money off of the subscriber fees that are paid by members. But then they're using that money in various things that are not supposed to be profit seeking, but are kind of reinvesting back into the community.