Switch edu-ID for Universities and other Organizations

Universities and other organizations can integrate their identity management with Switch edu-ID. These are the benefits:

  • With an edu-ID integration, universities enable their members - students, teachers, staff and others - to access thousands of services in Switzerland and abroad.
  • edu-ID has good support not only for regular university members like students, staff, teachers, but also loosely coupled user groups like prospective students, alumni, further education students, guests, project partners or library walk-in users.

  • The technical integration requires setting up a one-way synchronization of user data from universities to Switch. There is no need for a university to operate an IdP to get access to the edu-ID federation.
  • Infrastructure and user data remain under full control of the Switch community.
  • Support for multiple identity and access management protocols: SAML, OpenID Connect and SCIM.
  • Switch maintains the highest security standards, user data protection by design, high performance and high availability.

  • A Switch edu-ID account fully manages user credentials like passwords or other authentication methods.
  • Switch edu-ID supports strong authentication with 2-step login and Passkeys.
  • Supports linking with other academic identities like ORCID.

  • The service is continuously extended to interoperate with other identity federations like edulog, the governmental e-ID, self-sovereign identity (SSI).

Want to join your organisation to Switch edu-ID?

The primary goal for Switch edu-ID is cooperation between higher education organizations like cantonal universities, ETHZ, EPFL, universities of applied sciences, and universities for teacher education, as well as higher education-related organizations such as research institutions, university hospitals, and organizations for higher education policy, mobility promotion, and research project financing.

Other organizations can apply to join. The decisive factor for assessment is the benefit to the higher education community.

Organizations considering joining should consider the following aspects:

  • Joining Switch edu-ID as an organization requires technical integration of identity management with the edu-ID service.
  • Membership only gives members of your organization technical access to potentially thousands of services. If licenses are required to use a service, these must be negotiated bilaterally between the organization and the service operator.
  • Before joining, you should know which services you want to make available to your organization's members.
  • There is a fee for joining. The basic fee is CHF 5'000, plus additional fees for technical integration and active users.

What needs to be done to integrate the IdM of a university or organization with edu-ID? Follow these steps to migrate an existing AAI IdP to edu-ID, or alternatively set up a new Home Organization from scratch.

Note: If your organization wants to provide a service for the Switch edu-ID federation then go to the section for services.