Eduroam: towards a pan-European research and education federation
Klaas Wierenga, SURFnet, Netherlands

The number of mobile devices within academia has increased significantly over the last couple of years and users expect to be able to get connectivity everywhere, at home, on the road and at educational institutions. At the same time however, the security of wireless LANs becomes more and more of a concern. In 2003, the TERENA Task Force on Mobility was created to look at WLAN security issues and to formulate requirements to design an international roaming solution that would provide National Research and Educational Networks (NREN's) users with secure Internet access at academic campuses across Europe. The solution proposed was tested and proved to be very successful with more and more institutions joining it. This infrastructure is called eduroam, which stands for Education Roaming. Within the 6th framework project GÉANT2 the aim is to expand the existing infrastructure into a pan-European full service for Roaming and Authentication/Authorisation. Eduroam proves to be a very valuable asset in establishing such an infrastructure. The architectural foundations of eduroam as well as the established trust between many countries and hundreds of educational institutes are important building blocks for something that is much more than simple wireless LAN roaming.

Biography

Klaas Wierenga is manager of Middleware Services at SURFnet. He is co-chair of the TERENA taskforce on Mobility (TF-Mobility) and active member of the Internet2 working group on network authentication (SALSA NetAuth). Furthermore, he is leader of the Roaming task within the GN2 "Roaming and Authorisation" activity (JRA5).