Distributed Access Control for Web and Business Processes

Middleware influenced the research community in developing a number of systems for controlling access to distributed resources. Nowadays a new paradigm for the lightweight integration of business resources from different partners is starting to take hold – Web Services and Business Processes for Web Services. Security and access control policies for Web Services protocols and distributed systems are well studied and almost standardized, but there is not yet a comprehensive proposal for an access control architecture for business processes. So, it is worth looking at the available approaches to distributed authorization as a starting point for a better understanding of what they already have and what they still need to address the security challenges for business processes

SOA-aware Authorization Control

The question how to handle authorization of digital identities in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) remains an open issue. In this paper we present a design pattern for the integration of legacy systems with SOA using out-of-the-box (unmodified) application servers and discuss how the architecture has to be extended by an Identity Management (IdM) infrastructure. We claim that the IdM infrastructure itself must be designed in a service-oriented way to fit into the overall SOA approach. We introduce a possibility how to decouple the policy enforcement point from the application server and propose an architectural design pattern to seamlessly integrate the SOAs business-related functionality and the IdM infrastructure. An implementation case study illustrates how to apply the invocation pattern for secured web services

Integrating an AAA-based federation mechanism for OpenStack - The CLASSe view

Identity federations enable users, service providers, and identity providers from different organizations to exchange authentication and authorization information in a secure way. In this paper, we present a novel identity federation architecture for cloud services based on the integration of a cloud identity management service with an authentication, authorization, and accounting infrastructure. Specifically, we analyse how this type of authentication, authorization, and accounting–based federation can be smoothly integrated into OpenStack, the leading open source cloud software solution, using the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web specification for authentication and authorization. We provide details of the implementation undertaken in GÉANT's CLASSe project and show its validation in a real testbed

Next-Generation EU DataGrid Data Management Services

We describe the architecture and initial implementation of the next-generation of Grid Data Management Middleware in the EU DataGrid (EDG) project. The new architecture stems out of our experience and the users requirements gathered during the two years of running our initial set of Grid Data Management Services. All of our new services are based on the Web Service technology paradigm, very much in line with the emerging Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). We have modularized our components and invested a great amount of effort towards a secure, extensible and robust service, starting from the design but also using a streamlined build and testing framework. Our service components are: Replica Location Service, Replica Metadata Service, Replica Optimization Service, Replica Subscription and high-level replica management. The service security infrastructure is fully GSI-enabled, hence compatible with the existing Globus Toolkit 2-based services; moreover, it allows for fine-grained authorization mechanisms that can be adjusted depending on the service semantics.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla,Ca, USA, March 2003 8 pages, LaTeX, the file contains all LaTeX sources - figures are in the directory "figures

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Attack Surface Reduction for Web Services based on Authorization Patterns

During the design of a security architecture for a web application, the usage of security patterns can assist with fulfilling quality attributes, such as increasing reusability or safety. The attack surface is a common indicator for the safety of a web application, thus, reducing it is a problem during design. Today’s methods for attack surface reduction are not connected to security patterns and have an unknown impact on quality attributes, e.g., come with an undesirable trade-off in functionality. This paper introduces a systematic and deterministic method to reduce the attack surface of web services by deriving service interface methods from authorization patterns. We applied the method to the Participation Service that is part of the KIT Smart Campus system. The resulting RESTful web services of the application are presented and validated

Dynamic Trust Federation in Grids

Grids are becoming economically viable and productive tools. Grids provide a way of utilizing a vast array of linked resources such as computing systems, databases and services online within Virtual Organizations (VO). However, today’s Grid architectures are not capable of supporting dynamic, agile federation across multiple administrative domains and the main barrier, which hinders dynamic federation over short time scales is security. Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural issues in Grids. Existing relevant standards and specifications can be used to federate security services, but do not directly address the dynamic extension of business trust relationships into the digital domain. In this paper we describe an experiment in which we highlight those challenging architectural issues and we will further describe how the approach that combines dynamic trust federation and dynamic authorization mechanism can address dynamic security trust federation in Grids. The experiment made with the prototype described in this paper is used in the NextGRID project for the definition of requirements for next generation Grid architectures adapted to business application need