The GLASS project: supporting secure shibboleth-based single sign-on to campus resources

Higher and Further education institutions in the UK are in the process of migrating their IT infrastructures to exploit Shibboleth technologies for federated access management. Ease of use and secure access are paramount to the successful uptake of these technologies, both from the end user and system administrator perspective. The JISC-funded GLASS project is a one-year project investigating the use of Shibboleth to support single sign-on to a variety of campus resources at the University of Glasgow including browser-based email access; the Moodle online virtual learning environment; the WebSURF online student records facility, and a network filestore browser. This paper describes the implementation issues and experiences gained in rolling out the Shibboleth technologies to support federated access management

Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow

Forward-secure hierarchical predicate encryption

Secrecy of decryption keys is an important pre-requisite for security of any encryption scheme and compromised private keys must be immediately replaced. \emph{Forward Security (FS)}, introduced to Public Key Encryption (PKE) by Canetti, Halevi, and Katz (Eurocrypt 2003), reduces damage from compromised keys by guaranteeing confidentiality of messages that were encrypted prior to the compromise event. The FS property was also shown to be achievable in (Hierarchical) Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE) by Yao, Fazio, Dodis, and Lysyanskaya (ACM CCS 2004). Yet, for emerging encryption techniques, offering flexible access control to encrypted data, by means of functional relationships between ciphertexts and decryption keys, FS protection was not known to exist.\smallskip In this paper we introduce FS to the powerful setting of \emph{Hierarchical Predicate Encryption (HPE)}, proposed by Okamoto and Takashima (Asiacrypt 2009). Anticipated applications of FS-HPE schemes can be found in searchable encryption and in fully private communication. Considering the dependencies amongst the concepts, our FS-HPE scheme implies forward-secure flavors of Predicate Encryption and (Hierarchical) Attribute-Based Encryption.\smallskip Our FS-HPE scheme guarantees forward security for plaintexts and for attributes that are hidden in HPE ciphertexts. It further allows delegation of decrypting abilities at any point in time, independent of FS time evolution. It realizes zero-inner-product predicates and is proven adaptively secure under standard assumptions. As the ``cross-product" approach taken in FS-HIBE is not directly applicable to the HPE setting, our construction resorts to techniques that are specific to existing HPE schemes and extends them with what can be seen as a reminiscent of binary tree encryption from FS-PKE

WS-ARC service configuration manual

The central component of AR

IVOA Recommendation: IVOA Credential Delegation Protocol Version 1.0

The credential delegation protocol allows a client program to delegate a user's credentials to a service such that that service may make requests of other services in the name of that user. The protocol defines a REST service that works alongside other IVO services to enable such a delegation in a secure manner. In addition to defining the specifics of the service protocol, this document describes how a delegation service is registered in an IVOA registry along with the services it supports. The specification also explains how one can determine from a service registration that it requires the use of a supporting delegation service