10
October
2024

InCommon

20-Year Milestone: Making an Impact on Research with Kevin Thompson

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By Kevin Morooney - Vice President of Trust and Identity and NET+, Internet2

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

We continue to celebrate InCommon’s 20th birthday with a series of forward-facing conversations featuring prominent leaders in the research and higher education (R&E) community.

For this installment, I chatted with Kevin Thompson, a program director for the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Kevin has served at the NSF since 2003 and helped build the NSF Middleware Initiative and Experimental Infrastructure programs at the agency. Before his tenure at NSF, Kevin worked in the MCI Advanced Internet Technologies department, where he was responsible for the vBNS network and advanced network services.

InCommon 20th Anniversary logo

Kevin Thompson, program director at the National Science Foundation

To put it mildly, NSF support has been crucial to the success of InCommon. At a time before there were federations, NSF understood their potential to provide both security and privacy in support of research. Through a series of key grants, NSF provided seed funding to support the development of Shibboleth and the creation of InCommon. Since then, NSF has witnessed the growth and penetration of InCommon across the scientific research and education community, including research proposals underpinned by InCommon.

I had the opportunity to chat with Kevin about his experience with InCommon and where he sees us moving forward.

Kevin Morooney: Reflecting on the past 20 years, what do you believe has been InCommon’s most significant achievement?


Kevin Thompson: InCommon has unlocked the ability to share resources for the R&E community. The impact of this on science is difficult to fully measure, and it continues to deepen and evolve.

Further, giving the academic community single sign-on (SSO) access, as well as making access to resources scalable and manageable, has had an incredible impact.

Morooney: The NSF was instrumental in the development of InCommon, from concept to reality. You’ve seen InCommon move from idea to infrastructure; what strikes you about that 20-year journey?


Thompson: It takes time to move mountains.

Internet2 embraced and championed InCommon and stuck with it. Internet2 deserves huge recognition for this, and credit is especially due to Douglas Van Houweling — the first CEO of Internet2 — who made adopting the InCommon framework a priority talking point in his keynotes during the early years of InCommon.

Success stories like this always have a core individual — and often a core team — who remain totally committed to a vision over time. That core individual is Ken Klingenstein. The core team includes Ann West, Keith Hazelton, and others who have changed over time.

Morooney: Can you tell us about your first InCommon “Aha!” moment when you saw its potential as a global infrastructure to support the access management needs for complex multi-institutional research collaborations?


Thompson: That moment was when Ken Klingenstein walked me through underlying concepts and protocols, such as ABAC, SAML, and the trust fabric among resource providers and campus identity providers.

That conversation was around 20 years ago. The R&E community continues to grow and realize InCommon’s power and benefits.

Morooney: What problem(s) have InCommon tools and services solved for the NSF and the research/researchers you support?


Thompson: The examples I have span totally different scenarios in distributed science and scientific collaboration, from totally different periods of time. 

Around a decade ago, I saw a 2,000+ member scientific collaboration move to InCommon and instantly reform its AuthN/AuthZ approach to something that actually scaled and was manageable for them. 

More recently, I watched a nationally distributed compute fabric that serves hundreds of science projects improve its efficiency, scaling, manageability, and accounting by adopting CILogon and SciTokens.

Earlier today, at an international e-science workshop, I saw another country’s primary computing platform highlight CILogon because it helps to deliver cycles to its institutions and researchers.

Morooney: Looking ahead to the next 20 years, what do you envision for the future of InCommon?


Thompson: It is always dangerous to make predictions, but I predict deeper penetration into under-resourced institutions across the country, both via easier adoption and through state and regional services that handle federated identity management services on behalf of smaller institutions. 

As I’ve gone this far without mentioning it, eduroam will be part of this and, as usual, have the most visible impact on the campus-wide community. This will have a massive and positive effect on access to resources for these schools.

Morooney: What are three words or phrases that come to mind when you think of InCommon?


Thompson: Here are five: federation, SSO, collaboration, privacy-preserving, and trust.

As Kevin Thompson pointed out during our interview, InCommon provides invaluable resources to the R&E community. Over the past two decades, InCommon has worked with campuses and research institutions to connect the community to one another through scalable technologies and community-designed solutions. 

We look forward to continuing this spirit of collaboration and peer-led advancements in InCommon’s future.

About the Author(s)

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Kevin Morooney kmorooney@internet2.edu

Vice President of Trust and Identity and NET+, Internet2

Kevin Morooney currently leads the Trust and Identity and NET+ divisions at Internet2. Prior to coming to Internet2, Kevin was the chief information officer at Penn State. His interests include identity, cloud, privacy, security, and research computing. He was deeply involved with other community members in the development of InCommon.