SRCE Awards Recognition to the Catholic University of Croatia

On Tuesday, 3 March 2026, the University Computing Centre (SRCE) marked the 20th anniversary of the core electronic identity system in science and higher education – AAI@EduHr. The Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Croatia (AAI@EduHr) was launched into production on 1 March 2006 as the result of a project initiated in May 2004, responding to the growing need for a reliable and secure system for authentication and authorisation when using network services. The project was supported and financed by the then Ministry of Science, Education and Sports and implemented by SRCE in cooperation with CARNET.

The celebration was attended by numerous representatives of member institutions, the academic community and the business sector, and began with a working presentation of a new application for maintaining directory content – AOSI. After the opening address by SRCE Director Ivan Marić, the Head of the Sector for Middleware Systems and Information Security, Mijo Đerek, gave a brief overview of the past and present of the AAI@EduHr system and presented plans for its future development.

The Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure of Science and Higher Education in the Republic of Croatia (AAI@EduHr) is an infrastructural middleware system whose main purpose is to enable secure, reliable and efficient management of electronic identities and their simple use for accessing network services and resources available via the network.

“SRCE acts as the coordinator of the system, manages the development and maintenance of common central services, provides the normative framework and drives technological improvements. SRCE’s visionary role has been present since the very beginning of work on this system in 2004, and its international recognition came in 2007 when AAI@EduHr became the first federation to join the eduGAIN system, which is today a global system with thousands of services,” emphasised Mijo Đerek in his presentation.

Today, science and higher education would be unimaginable without this system, and its complexity and scope are reflected in the figures. The system includes more than one million electronic identities issued by 239 member institutions, which can be used to access 944 services within the system. In 2025 alone, the AAI@EduHr SSO service was used at least once by more than 700,000 unique users, generating more than 54 million successful authentications, while the system’s central RADIUS servers processed more than one billion successful authentication requests.

On this occasion, awards were also presented to the community for excellence in compliance with AAI@EduHr standards. In addition to the Catholic University of Croatia, which received the award in the category of institutions with more than 1,500 electronic identities, recognitions were also awarded to RRIF University of Applied Sciences in the category of institutions with up to 600 electronic identities and to the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Zagreb in the category of institutions with between 600 and 1,500 electronic identities.

The recognition on behalf of the Catholic University of Croatia was received by Rector Professor Željko Tanjić, PhD. The award also represents recognition for our University’s organisational unit for Information Technology, whose professional and dedicated work continuously ensures a high level of security, reliability and compliance of the electronic identity system with established standards. Its contribution to the development and improvement of the University’s digital infrastructure is of great importance for the effective functioning of teaching, research and administrative processes.