National research and education network

Last week, I was pleased to deliver the dinner keynote speech at the NREN Assembly.

The NREN Assembly is an annual gathering hosted by Canary that brings together staff and leadership from Canary alongside all 13 provincial and territorial partners of Canada's National Research and Education Network.

If you're a researcher at a Canadian academic institution or just someone who has logged into EDU Rome, you've used their infrastructure.

Now, with their kind permission, this week's episode features that keynote in full, which was titled Digital Sovereignty, Control, Choice, and Connection.

CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the same day, but here's where this becomes more than another vulnerability of the week story.

A few days before Fortinet publicly disclosed the CVE, Belgium's National Research and Education Network, Belnet, announced that it had discovered a security incident.

Belnet provides networking and related services to Belgian research institutions, universities, and government organizations.

On September twenty-fourth, they detected unauthorized activity in their infrastructure.

Um, I'll try to do that efficiently.

Um, eduroam was started in the higher ed, um, and National Research and Education Network context.

Um, and it was originally started-- Uh, actually next year is gonna be the 20th anniversary of eduroam officially.

Um, so started in the Netherlands, and I think the original eduroam network communicated between, like, the Netherlands and England, and it's based on this idea that if you have a username and account credentials at one university, wouldn't it be cool if you could just join the Wi-Fi at any other university [chuckles] that you also went to? And this made sense to-- It still makes sense to people who set up eduroam at their university or at their research institution because people in this space tend to go to the same kinds of locations.

They just connect automatically.

Um, it works through an identity federation.

So, uh, National Research and Education Networks, uh, kind of pioneered these ideas of setting up, um, common exchanges, or in the case of eduroam, we have these national servers, federation servers that every university, every eduroam subscriber, um, configures their networks to communicate with these federation servers.

That means that, like, if Harvard is connected to the federation, they don't have to know about every other school that's connected to the federation.