Janet Moonshot & FreeRADIUS on Microsoft Azure – An important step for Researchers for being able to use Microsoft’s Public Cloud Platform

Over the past months I’ve spent some time working with Janet the UK’s National Research and Education Network. As well as managing the operation and development of the Janet network, Janet runs a number of services for educationand research including operating eduroam(UK), the UK part of a large, global network established between all sorts of research and education facilities and institutions.

In addition to eduroam and other services, one of the most important projects Janet is leading is the development and standardization of an open platform for authentication, authorization and trust management based on existing standards:

This platform is called Project Moonshot.

Simply put, Moonshot in conjunction with FreeRADIUS is an identity provider and a security token service. Nevertheless it is primarily based on the protocols mentioned above – EAP, RADIUS and GSS-API/SSPI/SASL instead of WS-Federation, OAuth or SAML-P (although one of the token formats supported by Moonshot are SAML tokens).

Moonshot and FreeRADIUS on Azure

The result of our work with Janet was the release of a VM Depot Image that enables everyone to start testing and setting up Moonshot & FreeRADIUS on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. Interested in reading more – then go to my blog to find out all the technical details:

Janet Moonshot & FreeRADIUS on Microsoft Azure – An important step for Researchers for being able