Hannah Short, Team Lead for Identity and Access Management, CERN

In March 2025, CERN adopted the SeamlessAccess service as CERN’s discovery service for eduGAIN users.

Since 2019 over 35,000 unique eduGAIN users have authenticated to CERN services, with roughly 300 active eduGAIN users per day who are now supported through SeamlessAccess.

As highlighted by various international efforts, including the FIM4R white papers, visual branding for the eduGAIN experience has been a key missing feature for enabling truly federated research access. By adopting SeamlessAccess, CERN helps their users enjoy a more unified experience that reduces some of the friction in the log-in process.

“We were pleased to learn about the SeamlessAccess filtering possibility – which was a core motivator for our adoption of the service”, says Hannah Short, Team Lead for Identity and Access Management at CERN. This feature was particularly important because CERN only allows Sirtfi compliant Identity Providers to authenticate. By selectively only displaying those IdPs in the SeamlessAccess IdP discovery service, the user experience is improved whilst preserving CERN’s security standing.

The recent introduction of SeamlessAccess co-branding allows CERN to display its  logo during the discovery workflow, providing another step towards an experience that meets users’ expectations while providing a blanket of reassurance and security as they authenticate to CERN.

“At CERN, we plan to use SeamlessAccess for the foreseeable future and encourage other research communities to do likewise. The greater the uptake the more consistent the authentication experience for all!”, adds Hannah.