The DFN-AAI Federation is a service for scientific institutions (universities, research institutes) as well as providers of scientific information and content (e.g. publishers). DFN stands for: Verein zur Förderung eines Deutschen Forschungsnetzes / DFN Association and AAI for its authentication and authorization infrastructure. DFN Association regulates the cooperation of all partners in the DFN-AAI Federation by means of binding legal and technical standards in order to exchange user information and associated access authorizations and thus enable secure external access to campus-internal applications and services. These include e-science and e-learning systems, administration systems, licensed electronic information media of the library or GRID computing.

For the technical realization the program package "Shibboleth" is used in the DFN-AAI. Shibboleth is a development of the US-American INTERNET2 initiative and is based on the international standards HTTP, XML, XML Schema (XSD), XML Signature (XMLDisg), SOAP as well as SAML2. Shibboleth essentially consists of two software components, which were designed for the content and service providers (=service providers) on the one hand and for the scientific institutions (=identity providers) on the other hand. The use of Shibboleth enables e.g. remote or location-independent access to electronic information media of scientific publishers, which are licensed by the library.

DFN-AAI is used by the University of Paderborn for the following services, among others:

Access to electronic information media of the University Library
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