Hilco de Lathouder

Hilco is an IT professional who recently decided to broaden his horizons and follow the Security and Network Engineering Master’s Programme at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently doing the part-time 2-year program besides his job as a product manager. After seeing the practical side of computer science for about 15 years, he decided to dive deeper into the more theoretical side of things and help create the networks of the future. Since his first MSX computer back in 1989, he always had a keen interest in computers and networks.

He lives in Leiden, the Netherlands with his girlfriend and two kids aged 5 and 7. He finds that combining work, study and family life is challenging but fun and working out quite well.

Hilco’s participation in the Future Talent Programme (FTP22) was supported by the Dutch NREN SURF, where he did a 1-month research project to find out if and how they could start using 2 factor authentication between educational federations more efficiently.

Lightning Talk Topic

Multi-factor authentication support between eduGAIN federations

Lightning Talk proposal featuring the results of a 1-month research project conducted as part of the University of Amsterdam’s Security and Network engineering Master Program. The results are a start for improving support for (standardized) multi-factor authentication methods between eduGAIN federations.

Currently, if foreign users enrol with their home universities’ credentials for SURF‘s services, it is username/password by default because the service does not know if the university supports anything stronger. This is a general problem within eduGAIN and leads to a chicken-egg problem, which blocks the way for using more secure ways of authentication. Hilco’s research shows that there are ways to improve this and how the eduGAIN NREN administrators could facilitate this.