Features
Merchants using InAcademia can benefit from a number of features:
- Validation of eligibility: validates whether the user holds a specified role, such as ‘student’, at a participating higher education institution (we call this ‘affiliation’), by interoperating directly with the user’s home institution’s IDAM systems.
- Validates students, staff, faculty and employee affiliations/roles.
- Privacy preserving: returns a simple confirmation of affiliation, discarding any superfluous personal data, and this minimising the personal data to be processed.
- Fraud prevention: our re-use detection feature makes it possible for the merchant to detect where a user is attempting to re-use a one-time only offer.
- Control which institutions/countries you extend your deals to by using our IdP Hinting feature. By consuming a simple JSON feed that we provide and update every hour, you can create a prompt list or drop down of in-scope institutions.
- Alternatively, if you’re keen to offer your services across all of the countries that InAcademia supports, your users can select their institution from a list of in-scope HEIs across 39 countries by implementing our discovery service that has a clean look and feel and uses a smart search facility.
- Provides an OIDC-based gateway to academic federated identity.
- Operated by members of the academic federated identity community.
- InAcademia offers registration to a pre-production service that provides a testing facility prior to production launch.
Advanced features
InAcademia’s IdP hinting feature provides an easy-to-implement way to control which institutions and/or markets can access offers. We provide a repository of JSON feeds that can be consumed in order to populate prompts or drop down lists of in-scope institutions. In practice, this makes it possible for merchants to initiate a user redirect to the authentication process triggered by the user’s selection of their home institution. The feeds are updated frequently, which has the added benefit that if an institution changes the endpoint of its identity provider, or a new institution is introduced, the merchant will inherit the changes in a way that doesn’t disrupt the validation process.
The re_use detection feature adds a claim to the OIDC request that will elicit a privacy-preserving response from InAcademia that contains a pseudonymised hash of any supported persistent identifiers received from the IdP, presenting a series of values that merchants permitted to use the persistent flow can utilise in order to recognise a returning user, for example, allowing merchants to identify whether a user has already consumed a one-per-user offer.
The IdP Hint Assertion feature, when combined with IdP Hinting, makes it possible for a merchant to be satisfied that the user verified at the same institution that they selected when initiating the authentication process.
Please note: the InAcademia Service makes no attempt to create a relationship with users/students; its operators are in no way responsible or obligated to the end user for any aspect of the products/services subject to the purchase. InAcademia does not act as an agent for the student, merchant, institution or identity federation, and its academic validation is a non-linear process that does not relate to the sale itself.
Underlying Technology
Merchants connect to InAcademia using the widely adopted OIDC protocol. InAcademia provides a uniform technical experience for merchants and presents a familiar single-sign-on user interface to users. InAcademia interacts with the heterogeneous, largely SAML-based landscape of R&E Identity Federations and academic Identity Providers in the background, thus hiding all the complexity that is inherent in the varying policies of federation and identity provider solutions.
InAcademia’s enhanced error-handling capabilities improve significantly on the native OIDC errors, making it much easier for merchants to determine the ongoing workflow for the result of all validation requests.
More technical information about InAcademia.
Have a Question?
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In-scope countries:
- Albania
- Armenia
- Austria
- Azerbaijan
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czechia
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Georgia
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italy
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Moldova
- Netherlands
- North Macedonia
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Turkey
- Uganda
- Denmark