The Technical and Semantic Interoperability Task Force and its Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) Working Group have published a key deliverable, EOSC AAI Architecture 2025, providing interoperability guidelines for the initial implementation of the EOSC AAI Federation. This marks the first official output from the new EOSC-A Task Forces launched in 2024.
The guidelines come along with a practical guide for Candidate EOSC Nodes, outlining the steps necessary to connect with the EOSC AAI Federation. In the EOSC model, Nodes act as the primary integration points for services. As described in the EOSC Federation Handbook, services are onboarded to individual Nodes rather than directly to the Federation.
Available on Zenodo, EOSC AAI Architecture 2025 (version of March 2025), offers background on prior work and summarises recent advancements, including updates to the AARC Blueprint Architecture.
Read and download EOSC AAI Architecture 2025 on Zenodo
(version of March 2025)
EOSC AAI Federation’s early goals
At this phase, the overarching goal of the EOSC AAI Federation is twofold: 1) deliver SSO across the first wave of EOSC Nodes that will be forming the EOSC Federation, and 2) enable the execution of workflows that can utilise resources across multiple EOSC Nodes.
The design for this first implementation is guided by three core principles:
- Defining the minimum set of requirements;
- Prioritising the simplest possible component configuration; and
- Ensuring the solution is implementable with today’s technology.
To establish a solid foundation and deliver the essential functionality of the EOSC AAI Federation, several architectural and technical decisions have been made. These are detailed in the Implementation section of the deliverable and include, among others, the adoption of OpenID Connect and OAuth2 as core protocols, and the use of MyAccessID as the Identity and Trust Layer across the Federation.
As the build-up phase of the EOSC Federation is ramping up, the work for the implementation of the AAI Federation is supported by the AAI Working Group of the Technical and Semantic Interoperability Task Force and the first results will be presented at the EOSC Symposium 2025 in Brussels.
The EOSC AAI Architecture is expected to be updated by the end of this year, addressing additional areas and incorporating feedback gathered during the build-up phase. The work on the EOSC AAI Architecture and the AAI Federation will extend beyond 2025, with the goal to progressively introduce support for full-mesh, dynamic topologies, building on top of the OpenID Federation and related emerging standards.
