Helmholtz ID / AAI

This is the technical and administrative documentation on Helmholtz ID / AAI.

What is this about? What’s the difference between ID and AAI?

Helmholtz ID is the central service allowing unified user and group management for Helmholtz and beyond. It is technically and procedurally accomplished by the underlying Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) that is set up and maintained by HIFIS.

For a high-level representation, have a look at the Helmholtz ID / AAI Homepage on hifis.net.

Here we describe all you need to know about basic steps for end users and group managers, registering a Virtual Organisation (VO), managing groups in VOs, registering a service, joining as an identity provider, or using the AAI capabilities to authorise users and user groups for fine-grained access to your service(s), and more (see menu).

We further describe our goals, technology, and policies, and give further organisational information (see menu).

Goals

The goal of Helmholtz AAI is to enable stakeholders with a Helmholtz background to accomplish several tasks:

• Enable the participating Helmholtz Centres to provide services to well defined sets of federated users, based on solid authentication and authorisation.
• Enable Principal Investigators (VO Managers) at Helmholtz Centres to allocate resources on behalf of their group (VO) and to manage the authorisation for the members of their VOs.
• Enable global researchers to use services provided by Helmholtz Centres - given they are properly authorised and their identity is adequately understood.
• Align with European activities that focus around the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).