CINECA Report on GA4GH Researcher ID - D2.2

Authors - Mikael Linden (CSC), Martin Kuba (MU), Jorge Izquierdo Ciges (EBI), Mamana Mbiyavanga (UCT)
Contributing Partners: MU, CSC, SickKids, ClinicaGeno, EMBL-EBI, UCT

GA4GH Passport (a.k.a. GA4GH Researcher ID) is the GA4GH standard for expressing an authenticated researcher’s roles and data access permissions (a.k.a. passport visas). Together with the GA4GH Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) specification, it describes how passport visas are issued and delivered from their authority (such as a Data Access Committee) to the environment where the data access takes place (such as an analysis platform or cloud). The work package has contributed to the Passport and AAI standards which were approved by the GA4GH in October 2019.

This deliverable provides an overview of the GA4GH Passport and AAI standards (version 1.0) in general. It then describes in detail how ELIXIR AAI has implemented the specification as a Passport broker service. Some directions of the next version of the GA4GH Passport and AAI standards, which are still in development in the GA4GH DURI workstream, are displayed. Finally, a hands-on experiment presents how passports could alternatively leverage self-sovereign identity, an emerging identity and access management paradigm in the industry.