Kyle Lewis, vice president of cybersecurity strategy for InCommon Catalyst RDCT, will be our featured speaker for “How to Sirtfi – Going Beyond the Federation Security Checkbox” as part of IAM Online on Wednesday, July 19 at 1 p.m. ET with David Bantz, chair of the Incommon Community Trust and Assurance Board (CTAB), serving as moderator.
Kyle and David serve as co-chairs of the InCommon Sirtfi Exercise Planning Working Group (SEPWG). One of the SEPWG’s goals is to inform the community about how to institutionalize its practice in InCommon participants’ security teams. It’s more than publishing a security contact and checking the metadata box. It requires that security teams are familiar with federation and Sirtfi expectations, when in many organizations the security teams and the identity and access management (IAM) teams more used to dealing with InCommon and federation are not integrated.
Kyle, who coordinated InCommon’s first ever cybersecurity exercise last year, gave us a preview of some of the insights he’ll share during IAM Online.
Why is it important to institutionalize Sirtfi’s practice among InCommon participants’ security teams?
Each member of the InCommon federation is trusting the other members of the federation to live up to baseline expectations, which includes being able to operate within the Sirtfi security framework. If an institution has checked the metadata button for Sirtfi but not updated any internal procedures, nor trained their security contacts on what InCommon is, what a Sirtfi request is, and how to honor the Traffic Light Protocol, the Sirtfi assertion loses its trust value.