As the federation operator, DFN-Verein acts as a Trusted Third Party, which ensures compliance with the technical and legal framework conditions and thus establishes a relationship of trust. In this role, DFN-Verein assumes various tasks:

• Contracts with all participating institutions and service providers, see under Registration
• Creating guidelines (policies) and monitoring compliance with them

The following service components are offered to realize the federation operation on a technical level:

• metadata management, regular validation and signing of federation metadata
• Support of so-called local metadata for participating institutions
• Support of so-called virtual subfederations
• Operation of central localization services: Discovery services, also called “WAYF” (Where Are You From), see under Productive operation
• Active promotion of the (further) development of the Shibboleth Software, membership in the Shibboleth Consortium
• Operation of an Incident Response Team together with the DFN-CERT
• Support for technical problems and other AAI-related questions, see Contact
• Workshops and training for participating institutions and service providers (please send training requests to hotline@aai.dfn.de)

International cooperation:

• Cross-federation AAI via eduGAIN
• Collaboration in international initiatives (REFEDS) and projects such as GÉANT and AARC
• Support of international research communities: FIM4R, CLARIN etc.

Involvement of the user community in the design and further development of the service

• AAI forum as part of the DFN-Betriebstagung
• Participation in the ZKI working group Identity and Access Management
• Topic-specific ad-hoc working groups

Further development of the service on a technical, organizational and legal level:

• Regular consultations with the Forschungsstelle Recht im DFN
• Support for new technologies and standards such as OpenID Connect, membership in the OpenID Foundation, participation in the Research & Education Working Group
• Expansion of the service portfolio, e.g. edu-ID
• Evaluation of new approaches to increase the level of trust in the DFN-AAI, introduction of the REFEDS Assurance Framework