Germany – IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support – Aufbau einer gemeinsamen föderierten Identity- und Access-Management-Infrastruktur der Hamburger Hochschulen

University of Hamburg (hereinafter "UHH") is an excellence university with more than 43,000 students and approximately 6,000 employees, one of the most research-intensive universities in Germany and one of the largest educational institutions in Northern Germany. With its "Flagship University" concept in the Hamburg metropolitan region, it cultivates innovative and cooperative links with scientific and non-scientific partners. It produces future-oriented societal goods such as education, knowledge, and the exchange of knowledge for the location – but also nationally and internationally – under the guiding principle of sustainability. The presidencies of the 6 Hamburg universities signed a Letter of Intent in April 2024 for a common IT operation of the Hamburg universities. The aim is to establish a joint organisation that is controlled by the universities, understands, bundles and implements their needs, and provides high-quality IT services specifically for scientific institutions across the entire service spectrum. A service centre is to be set up and established, which aims to create synergies and thus make digital services more efficient, targeted, user-centred, comprehensive, and at the same time of better quality and protected against cyber-attacks. As part of this common IT operation, it is necessary to create a common, federated Identity and Access Management (IAM) structure for the Hamburg universities. The overarching goal is to provide services for all Hamburg universities based on established federation technologies. Each university is to be equipped with a local IAM system, and the then technology-compatible systems are to be integrated into a common, federated identity and access state infrastructure. The authoritative administration of identities remains decentralised with the individual institutions. A central master directory is to be set up to hold the necessary personal attributes for joint operation. Such a federated infrastructure enables the universities to participate in jointly or centrally provided services (e.g. cloud, collaboration and e-learning services) and at the same time significantly increases the security of access, as modern, open standards such as SAML, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SCIM and FIDO2 are to be implemented throughout. For an organisation-independent, uniform and permanent identification of users, for example, also in the event of a change between universities, the nationwide federation service of the German Research Network (DFN-AAI) including the eduID service is to be used as a basis. The joint state federation is envisaged as a sub-federation within the DFN-AAI to enable university-wide coordination beyond a uniform attribute set. The project aims to design, build and transfer this common federated IAM state infrastructure into regular operation. The subsequent inclusion of further scientific institutions in Hamburg is not ruled out.