Federated-Access Management System and Videoconferencing Applications: Results from a Pilot Service during COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Videoconferencing has become a crucial enabler for sustainable collaboration and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, national regulations often restrict public institutions from introducing commercial videoconferencing services. Open-source software is an attractive option for institutions if it can be protected from potential security threats while ensuring high usability. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, we hardly find available open-source videoconferencing applications in the literature that stress their usability and adopt security-related frameworks. This study presents a federated-access management system called trustHub, which was developed to enable flexible and elaborate access control and protocol-agnostic user authentication. In addition, we introduce two videoconferencing applications that aim to improve the usability of leveraged open-source software. They are prototyped to operate in concert with trustHub to take firm access control and accept various types of identity providers. Consequently, using data collected from trustHub and a prototyped videoconferencing application over a 10-month period, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to understand the usage patterns of federated access and videoconferencing during the pandemic and, thus, verify their feasibility indirectly.