News

TENET’s trust & identity team run regular information sharing sessions covering SAFIRE and other services. A full schedule of forthcoming events is available at events.tenet.ac.za.

On the evening of Tuesday 11 January, we will deploy a number of changes to the SAFIRE Federation hub to allow for the bi-directional signalling of REFEDS MFA. No downtime is expected, and we do not anticipate any impact on any service- or identity-provider that does not currently support such signalling.

The University of Venda have signed the Participation Agreement and completed the technical integration. UNIVEN are now a fully functioning identity provider. Welcome UNIVEN!

Sol Plaatje University have signed the Participation Agreement, as well as completed the technical integration and are now a fully functioning identity provider in SAFIRE. Welcome SPU!

Following a period of consultation and starting from 31 March 2021, we’ve made several changes to SAFIRE’s idp- & sp-requirements and to the minimum attributes required for participation.

For some time, a key use case for SAFIRE has been integration with various library services such as publishers and data providers. Despite their importance to the federation, thus far we’ve not had a communication channel aimed explicitly at systems librarians and library staff making these integrations work. That’s about to change

The University of the Free State have signed the Participation Agreement and completed the technical integration. UFS are now a fully functioning identity provider. Welcome UFS!

Yesterday President Cyril Ramaphosa proclaimed the commencement of the bulk of the remainder of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) from 1 July 2020. This sets in motion a number of things, including a requirement for compliance within one year of commencement.

POPIA has profound implications for the way South Africans handle personal information, and particularly for services like identity federation.

In April 2020, SAFIRE was approached by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) who expressed interest in joining SAFIRE as a Service Provider.

While Kortex have temporarily made limited free access available under their Free Student eTextbook Programme FSTP, federated authentication using institutional credentials is also now possible.