News: Comrat State University joined eduGAIN to have secure global access to digital academic services

Comrat State University joined eduGAIN to have secure global access to digital academic services

Students, staff and researchers at Comrat State University (KDU) can now fully benefit from joining eduGAIN. eduGAIN enables participating institutions and their affiliated users and services to interconnect efficiently with multiple authentication and authorisation infrastructures. With a single trusted identity from their own institution, KDU users can access potentially hundreds of different services worldwide, which play an important role in accelerating digital transformation in global research and education.

On October 10, 2025, RENAM delivered a seminar for the promotion of the eduGAIN service in support of the research and education community in Moldova; the event was hosted by KDU. As the national research and education network, RENAM develops modern electronic communications infrastructure and provides high-speed internet access and advanced digital services to academic institutions across the country.

Dr. Svetlana Ghenova, Vice-Rector for Research and International Relations at KDU, opened the seminar by highlighting the importance of online services for research and education. She noted their value for e-learning, teaching, conferencing, scientific collaboration, analysing and sharing data, accessing journals and libraries. Following successful collaboration with RENAM on eduroam implementation, KDU is now committed to adopting more services provided and supported by RENAM.

RENAM specialists Valentin Pocotilenco and Olga Popcova gave presentations on a variety of digital services, emphasizing the value of secure, federated access.

eduGAIN – a user authentication and authorisation service within the national identity federation LEAF (MoLdovan ResEarch and EducAtion Identity Federation), which simplifies access to national and European information resources for the research and education community. Today eduGAIN is used by over 80 national federations worldwide connecting more than 8,000 Identity and Service Providers. Several examples of resources were outlined:

• Erasmus+ App – single point of entry for participants to access information on Erasmus+ opportunities;
• LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue – platform for discovering and disseminating biodiversity and ecosystem-related data and services;
• CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory – provides a means of exploring language resources and tools.

eduVPN – a secure network connection service to access internal resources of the institution as well as services from different or remote locations.

FileSender – a service that enables to send large files quickly and securely. The sender has full control over who receives and can access the files and for which period of time – as it should be. With privacy, data security and digital sovereignty high on the agenda of both organizations and individuals, the FileSender open source web-application provides a secure, trustworthy and transparent way for sharing large files. According to the FileSender deployment map updated in April 2025, there are 48 countries in the world where the FileSender service is provided to the corresponding national R&E communities. In the Republic of Moldova the FileSender service is implemented by RENAM to support research and education institutions: https://filesender.renam.md/

EOSC EU Node services – robust set of 6 services, that address key challenges in modern research workflows, allowing users to operate efficiently within data-intensive environments:

• File Sync & Share (ownCloud) – enable automatic file syncing and secure sharing across locations and teams;
• Interactive Notebooks (JupyterHub) – create and share documents that include live code in programming languages (e.g., R and Python), mathematical equations, visualisations, and explanatory text;
• Large File Transfer (FileSender) – streamline large file transfers online with added security and integrity;
• Virtual Machines (OpenStack) – researchers are provided compute resources to launch their own Virtual Machines to create isolated environments for experimenting with different configurations, software setups, or algorithms;
• Cloud Container Platform (OKD – OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) – deploy cloud-native containerised applications that can easily scale;
• Bulk Data Transfer (FTS – File Transfer Service) – simplifies the migration, automation, and monitoring of data transfer workflows while preserving existing client-side configurations for authentication, access, and firewalls at origin.

An updated EOSC EU Node User Access Policy (version 2.2) defines the access groups, their corresponding access rights, service limits, and virtual credit allocation policies for the users. It brings clearer user roles, increased credit allocations, and expanded access to compute services, ensuring that the EOSC EU Node platform keeps pace with the needs of Europe’s research community. In particular, the policy outlines the following roles:

• Collaborators for faculty staff (500 Credits);
• Investigators for researchers (1500 Credits).

Credits are virtual, they have no monetary value. Credits are replenished to the default allocation every three months (90 days) period.

Over 30 participants, comprising KDU administration, university staff and students, attended the seminar. The discussion that followed the presentations covered a variety of areas, such as the usefulness of the presented services, benefits for KDU users of access to various resources and services (using federated user authentication process), technical aspects of the FileSender service, etc.

RENAM provides to all Moldovan research and education institutions the necessary assistance in implementation of federated access to services and in becoming a member of the LEAF national identity federation. For more details please contact us via email leaf@renam.md.