Linkey
18 May 2012I’ve very pleased to announce that LNCD have won another JISC funded project under the Access and Identity Management programme. This will be the fifth JISC project I’ll have worked on (for the other projects I’ve been involved with see my bio.
The project is called Linkey (yes we managed to make another Lincoln based pun to join our others - lncn.eu (“Linking You”) and LNCD (“LNCD is Not a Central Development group”) and will be looking at how the OAuth 2.0 specification can be implemented in HEIs. The primary driver for this is to improve the student and staff experience and meet the following objectives:
- Richer sharing of data between applications: A student or lecturer should be able to identify themselves to multiple applications and approve access to the sharing of personal data between those applications.
- A consistent user experience (UX): We are initially aiming for ‘consistent sign on’ rather than ‘single sign on’, where the user is presented with a consistent UX when signing into disparate applications.
- Rapid deployment: New applications that we develop or purchase should be easier to implement, plugging into either OAuth or the UAG and immediately benefiting from 1) and 2).
The project will last for 12 months and the primary outcomes will be:
- A case study about our use and implementation of OAuth here at the University of Lincoln
- Significantly adding to my CodeIgniter OAuth 2.0 server by implementing the OAuth SAML bearer specification as well as hopefully all of the main authentication flows. I’m also going to work with on turning it it into a generic PHP Composer package so any PHP application can get some OAuth love. Finally I want to look at implementing [Selenium] tests (in addition to the usual PHPUnit tests) so that there is an awesome user experience.
- A public workshop on the use of OAuth 2.0 in Further and Higher Education.
- A conference/journal paper, based on our case study.
I’ve embedded the bid we submitted to JISC below: