What is eduGAIN

eduGAIN provides an efficient, flexible way for participating federations, and their affiliated users and services, to interconnect

Today, online services are crucial for research and education. Students, teachers, researchers and institution staff rely on them for collaboration through many web services. This can be for e-learning, tea​ching and conferencing, analysing and sharing data, accessing journals and libraries etc. Enabling easy and convenient access to users is a key part of delivering a service. Service providers do not want the headaches associated with issuing passwords to users, and the user does not want yet another password.

With just one trusted identity provided by user’s institution as part of an identity federation participating in eduGAIN, users can access services from other participating federations. Even better, it works with single sign-on (SSO), so that user needs to login only one time during a browser session.

R&E identity federations are typically deployed on a national level and use different architectures, systems and policies. eduGAIN enables identity federations to interconnect, so that participating institutions and services can collaborate without the need to establish individual bilateral connections.

Benefits of eduGAIN

Users, services and organisations who need to easily and securely manage access to services benefit from eduGAIN because identity federations enable them to reuse their existing systems to operate across borders without having to make many individual agreements.

eduGAIN is a global service. Around the world there are more than 55 federations participating in or in the process of joining eduGAIN, with more than 2,600 identity providers and 1,800 service providers.

Who is eduGAIN for?

 Identity federations

  • Join the eduGAIN service as it enables you to interconnect with other federations
  • Lean on eduGAIN trustworthy service – enables secure exchange of federation information
  • Enable you to provide more services for your users available through other federations
  • Gain in time saving and lower administration costs as no need for bilateral federation agreements

  Identity providers

  • Join an identity federation participating in eduGAIN​
  • Offer more to your users – enable access to a wider range of services than are available locally or nationally
  • No extra administrative burden if you are already participating in an identity federation

  Users – identity holders

  • Gain your federated identity from your home organisation i.e. identity provider
  • Access a wider range of services than are available nationally or locally
  • One digital identity for all services connected through eduGAIN
  • eduGAIN is ‘invisible’ to you so you can access services without extra effort – just login and be online !

 Service providers

  • Join an identity federation participating in eduGAIN
  • Grow your audience by making your service available to a greater number of users
  • Lower costs per user – your audience grows without increasing costs for maintenance of users credentials