InCommon Round-Up: 3 Things You May Have Missed in December

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Summary

• Catalysts Provide Identity Governance and Administration Advice
• Threads Meetup Addresses How to Solve Research and Education’s Identity Proofing Puzzle
• InCommon Hosts Fourth Annual Cyber Security Cooperation Exercise

Catalysts Provide Identity Governance and Administration Advice

In the last quarterly InCommon Catalyst Program Q&A column of 2025, we got two catalysts to discuss various aspects of identity governance and administration (IGA).

Our featured catalysts shared their experience testing various IGA and identity and access management (IAM) tools on the market. The duo also shares their thoughts about the most significant challenges that institutions face in managing IGA solutions.

Threads Meetup Addresses How to Solve Research and Education’s Identity Proofing Puzzle

In October 2025, InCommon hosted an Identity Proofing Thread Meetup to discuss the growing challenges of identity verification and fraud prevention across research and higher education institutions.

The conversation underscored both the urgent need for standardized identity proofing solutions and the complex landscape institutions must navigate.

Read our recap of this conversation to get the rundown on the challenges that institutions frequently face, identified solutions, and potential upcoming programming from InCommon Academy on this topic.

InCommon Hosts Fourth Annual Cyber Security Cooperation Exercise

REFEDS Security Incident Response Trust Framework for Federated Identity (Sirtfi) is part of InCommon’s Baseline Expectations for federation members. It provides federation identity providers (IdPs) and service providers (SPs) with a means to communicate and coordinate security incident responses. But do teams know when — and how — to use it?

To test incidence response, more than a dozen university, federation, and government security came together in November 2025 for the fourth annual InCommon cybersecurity cooperation exercise.

In this blog, we recap the scenarios that teams faced and what was learned from the exercise.