Understanding where to get started with best practices for Federated Identity Management can be a minefield. Even translating the guideline titles into language that makes sense for someone new to the field can be challenging!

To make life a little bit easier, a colour-coded guide to the AARC Guidelines has recently been published at https://aarc-community.org/architecture/. The coloured blocks match the infrastructure components of the AARC Blueprint Architecture, as seen in the following example for the Access Protocol Translation layer:

Access Protocol Translation:
  • Which best practices should I follow for my Token Translation Services? AARC-G004
  • How should I translate from Identity Federation information to X.509 certificates? AARC-G010

Feedback so far has been very positive – we hope that you are able to use this work to adopt common best practices more easily!

It may also help for you to put your Research Community’s Infrastructure in the context of others, to answer questions such as; “how do they stack together?” and “what does the chain of trust look like?”. The AARC Blueprint Architecture publication goes into this additional detail and includes the following useful diagram.


This work was completed by members of the GN4-3 Project. As part of the GÉANT 2020 Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA), the project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 856726 (GN4-3).