AAI for the SWITCH Community
What is the SWITCH Community?
The categories of organizations which belong to the SWITCH Community are defined in Appendix 1 of the Service Regulations for services by SWITCH.
- Cantonal universities
- Federal Institutes of Technology [ETH]
- ETH Research Facilities
- Technical Colleges
- Teacher Training Colleges
For the SWITCH Community, the participation in the SWITCHaai Federation is according to the Service Regulations for Services by SWITCH. An organization part of the SWITCH Community may operate an Identity Provider (IdP) to serve as Home Organization for its users and it may operate AAI-enabled web resources (Service Providers, SP).
Becoming a SWITCHaai Participant
The SWITCH edu-ID Service Description is the core document where all rights and obligations are listed, e.g. the 'SWITCHaai Federation Policy' in chapter 5.
To participate in SWITCHaai, your organization has to be part of the SWITCH Community and request the Basic Service 'SWITCHaai'. Contact the AAI team at aai@switch.ch.
Standard Data Protection Clause
In order to satisfy the data protection laws and regulations, every IdP Operator is obliged to follow the instructions concerning Legal Templates for SWITCHaai. See also chapter 6.3.3 of the SWITCH edu-ID Service Description.
Technical Information
In order to technically join the federation it is of course necessary to install and configure an Identity Provider. SWITCH strongly recommends to use the open source implementation Shibboleth. For that purpose, SWITCH provides installation instructions and How-To manuals for all major platforms.
More on the Identity Provider deployment page
Identity Provider Hosting: SWITCH provides the service 'Identity Provider Hosting'. Instead of investing the resources to maintain their own Identity Provider, organizations that belong to the SWITCH Community can let SWITCH operate an Identity Provider for them.
More on the Identity Provider Hosting service