GÉANT Services

Membership within GÉANT network and GÉANT services  are among highest priorities for Kosovo NREN. Kosovo NREN will be member of GÉANT network in nearer future.

GÉANT is the pan-European data network for the research and education community. It interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, enabling collaboration on projects ranging from biological science, to earth observation, to arts and culture. The GÉANT project combines a high-bandwidth, high-capacity 50,000 km network with a growing range of services.[1] These allow researchers to collaborate, working together wherever they are located.

Together with European NRENs, GÉANT connects 50 million users in over 10,000 institutions. Through links to research networks in other regions (such as Internet2[3] and ESnet[4] in the USA, AfricaConnect[5] in Africa, TEIN[6] in Asia-Pacific and RedCLARA[7] in Latin America), GÉANT enables collaboration between researchers in over half the world’s countries.

Co-funded by the European Commission and Europe’s NRENs, the GÉANT network was built and is operated by the GÉANT Association. The GÉANT project is a collaboration between 41 partners: 38 European NRENs, and NORDUnet (representing the five Nordic countries). Through the network’s connections to similar infrastructures, both in Europe and across all continents, the GÉANT partnership ensures that Europe remains at the forefront of research.

As GÉANT member, NREN can use services and can participate in various projects. In following text there is description of the most known services offered by GÉANT for its members.

Bellow is list of some of GEANT services, while the most known and used are described sperately:

  • EduGain – Unlocking global research and education ​​collaboration. It enables the trustworthy exchange of information between service providers and research and education institutions or other identity providers. eduGAIN gives service providers access to a larger pool of users internationally, and allows users to access resources of peer institutions or commercial or cloud services using their one trusted identity. This means simpler access to a wider range of online content, services and other resources that benefit collaboration in the research and education community. eduGAIN provides access to all the online services that students, researchers and educators need while minimizing the number of accounts users and service providers have to manage – reducing costs, complexity and security risks.
  • Ed​uPKI​​ – Supporting digital certificates for GÉANT services – eduPKI supportBelow is list of some of GRANT services, while the most known GEAN services are described and covered separately:s GÉANT services in defining their requirements for digital certificates. ​It helps coordinate the provision of these on a pan-European basis and enables existing Certification Authorities (CAs) to issue certificates for GÉANT services that require them.
  • TRANSITS Training – High-quality training for computer security teams – TRANSITS provides affordable, high-quality training to both new and experienced computer security incident response team (CSIRT) personnel, as well as individuals with a bona-fide interest in establishing a CSIRT.
  • Trusted Introducer​ – ​Building mutual trust between security teams – Many research and education networking organisations, commercial internet service providers, telecommunications operators and governments have established computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs) to deal with network security incidents. Collaboration between trusted teams is very important because incidents often originate from outside the network that is affected. The Trusted Introducer (TI) service forms the backbone of infrastructure services and acts as a clearinghouse for all computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs), building a ‘web of trust’ between CSIRTs by listing known teams, and accrediting and certifying teams according to their demonstrated and checked level of maturity.

Increasing online security by facilitating the deployment of digital certificates – TCS takes advantage of a bulk purchasing arrangement whereby participating national research and education networking organizations (NRENs) may issue close to unlimited numbers of certificates provided by a commercial CA at a significantly reduced price.

The five main types of certificates available are (4500 euro/year):

  1. SSL certificates – for authenticating servers and establishing secure sessions with end member s.
  2. Grid certificates – for authenticating Grid hosts and services (IGTF compliant).
  3. Member certificates – for identifying individual users and securing email communications.
  4. Code signing certificates – for authenticating software distributed over the internet.
  5. Document signing certificates – for authenticating documents from Adobe PDF, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice.

This service will bring added value to the community at a very low cost. By the arrangement made by GÉANT, members will have access to virtually unlimited pool of certificates for its users. Given that the current commercial price of a single certificate purchased from an established and trusted provider ranges between 30 and 200 euro, there is a margin for NREN to charge its users and resell them certificates at deep-discounted prices, thus generating revenue.

EduMEET is a webRTC based video conferencing system which allows users to dynamically create video conference rooms for either 1-to-1 or multiple user conferences. The major advantage of eduMEET is that there is no need for any client software to be installed as most modern browsers on both laptops and mobile devices support webRTC protocols natively.

Video Conferencing (VC) is an essential support tool and although many commercial solutions exist, the problems of ease of use, cost, reliability and trustworthiness can be barriers to their use within the R&E community. R&E needs a low-cost, open and transparent alternative VC solution that requires no special software to operate and can be operated and supported from within the community. Users in scope of different projects (which may also be spread geographically) need to collaborate across different organisations and countries and they expect services that are accessible and interoperable. The eduMEET simplifies real-time communication and introduces browser based personal conferencing tool that runs without the need to install any additional clients or plugins. Only the web-browser and simple web-camera are enough to start using the eduMEET service.

Enhanced functional features are available, in particular:

  • WebRTC audio/video communication;
  • screen sharing, file sharing and chat feature;
  • federated login, including edugain;
  • speaker detection (microphone analyser with visual indicator);
  • audio and video streams management ;
  • full-screen mode, raise hand option, connection testing;
  • customizable view layout (democratic and filmstrip);
  • high resolution support (tested up to 4K).

Advantages of eduMEET solution, are:

  • Own, open source software
  • Secure communication
  • Trust – on level of similar organizations
  • Trustworthy – Keeping the AV traffic inside our network (GÉANT + NRENs) as long as possible
  • Low cost compared with commercial solutions
  • WebRTC standards based and easy to use
  • No need for installation of custom applications

Instalation models – there are two general delivery models of the service at the moment:

  • On-prem – this is the main service delivery model where the users can build own services based on software provided by GÉANT and own resources (VM or hardware servers).
  • eduMEET as a Service – eduMEET cloud hosted instance will be available as a centrally hosted service to GÉANT project participants.
FileSender is a web-based application that allows authenticated users to securely and easily send arbitrarily large files to other people, free of charge. Authentication of users is provided through Simple SAML php, supporting SAML2, LDAP and RADIUS and more. Users without an account can be sent an upload voucher by an authenticated user. FileSender is developed to the requirements of the higher education and research community.

GÉANT provides a FileSender instance on a best-effort basis as a demonstration of its potential and to persuade national research and education network (NREN) organisations to set up their own instance as a service to their constituencies. It is open source software and available.

Authentication of users is provided through Simple SAML php, supporting SAML2, LDAP and RADIUS and more. Users without an account can be sent an upload voucher by an authenticated user. FileSender is developed to the requirements of the higher education and research community.

Once the authorization and authentication infrastructure will be in place in NREN, it is recommended that NREN deploys its own instance on its own hardware infrastructure and offer FileSender as a service to its users.