A 3GPP open-ID framework

Currently Mobile Network Operators (MNO) rely on an authentication, authorization and profile management architecture which has proved, by its generalized use and acceptance, as being appropriate. The use of a secure component, the SIM-Card, provides a set of capabilities not seen in other access architectures and an advantage for MNOs. Nevertheless upcoming requirements in terms of open interfaces, new services and customer demands are questioning the actual architecture. This paper presents a novel approach to authentication and profile management that can be reused by both MNOs and 3rd party providers to answer the upcoming requirements. Here, a user is able to store his own identity information in different places, while taking advantage of the strong authentication mechanisms provided by the MNO. Furthermore, by integrating MNOs' generic authentication architecture with user-centric identity management, we are creating a generic way for service providers to reuse this authentication infrastructure, providing both single sign-on and strong authentication. Copyright © 2010 The authors

Contributions to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms

Identity information, personal data and user’s profiles are key assets for organizations and companies by becoming the use of identity management (IdM) infrastructures a prerequisite for most companies, since IdM systems allow them to perform their business transactions by sharing information and customizing services for several purposes in more efficient and effective ways. Due to the importance of the identity management paradigm, a lot of work has been done so far resulting in a set of standards and specifications. According to them, under the umbrella of the IdM paradigm a person’s digital identity can be shared, linked and reused across different domains by allowing users simple session management, etc. In this way, users’ information is widely collected and distributed to offer new added value services and to enhance availability. Whereas these new services have a positive impact on users’ life, they also bring privacy problems. To manage users’ personal data, while protecting their privacy, IdM systems are the ideal target where to deploy privacy solutions, since they handle users’ attribute exchange. Nevertheless, current IdM models and specifications do not sufficiently address comprehensive privacy mechanisms or guidelines, which enable users to better control over the use, divulging and revocation of their online identities. These are essential aspects, specially in sensitive environments where incorrect and unsecured management of user’s data may lead to attacks, privacy breaches, identity misuse or frauds. Nowadays there are several approaches to IdM that have benefits and shortcomings, from the privacy perspective. In this thesis, the main goal is contributing to the privacy provisioning for federated identity management platforms. And for this purpose, we propose a generic architecture that extends current federation IdM systems. We have mainly focused our contributions on health care environments, given their particularly sensitive nature. The two main pillars of the proposed architecture, are the introduction of a selective privacy-enhanced user profile management model and flexibility in revocation consent by incorporating an event-based hybrid IdM approach, which enables to replace time constraints and explicit revocation by activating and deactivating authorization rights according to events. The combination of both models enables to deal with both online and offline scenarios, as well as to empower the user role, by letting her to bring together identity information from different sources. Regarding user’s consent revocation, we propose an implicit revocation consent mechanism based on events, that empowers a new concept, the sleepyhead credentials, which is issued only once and would be used any time. Moreover, we integrate this concept in IdM systems supporting a delegation protocol and we contribute with the definition of mathematical model to determine event arrivals to the IdM system and how they are managed to the corresponding entities, as well as its integration with the most widely deployed specification, i.e., Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In regard to user profile management, we define a privacy-awareness user profile management model to provide efficient selective information disclosure. With this contribution a service provider would be able to accesses the specific personal information without being able to inspect any other details and keeping user control of her data by controlling who can access. The structure that we consider for the user profile storage is based on extensions of Merkle trees allowing for hash combining that would minimize the need of individual verification of elements along a path. An algorithm for sorting the tree as we envision frequently accessed attributes to be closer to the root (minimizing the access’ time) is also provided. Formal validation of the above mentioned ideas has been carried out through simulations and the development of prototypes. Besides, dissemination activities were performed in projects, journals and conferences.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: María Celeste Campo Vázquez.- Secretario: María Francisca Hinarejos Campos.- Vocal: Óscar Esparza Martí

An Innovative Workspace for The Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an initiative to build the next generation, ground-based gamma-ray observatories. We present a prototype workspace developed at INAF that aims at providing innovative solutions for the CTA community. The workspace leverages open source technologies providing web access to a set of tools widely used by the CTA community. Two different user interaction models, connected to an authentication and authorization infrastructure, have been implemented in this workspace. The first one is a workflow management system accessed via a science gateway (based on the Liferay platform) and the second one is an interactive virtual desktop environment. The integrated workflow system allows to run applications used in astronomy and physics researches into distributed computing infrastructures (ranging from clusters to grids and clouds). The interactive desktop environment allows to use many software packages without any installation on local desktops exploiting their native graphical user interfaces. The science gateway and the interactive desktop environment are connected to the authentication and authorization infrastructure composed by a Shibboleth identity provider and a Grouper authorization solution. The Grouper released attributes are consumed by the science gateway to authorize the access to specific web resources and the role management mechanism in Liferay provides the attribute-role mapping

Identity in research infrastructure and scientific communication: Report from the 1st IRISC workshop, Helsinki Sep 12-13, 2011

Motivation for the IRISC workshop came from the observation that identity and digital identification are increasingly important factors in modern scientific research, especially with the now near-ubiquitous use of the Internet as a global medium for dissemination and debate of scientific knowledge and data, and as a platform for scientific collaborations and large-scale e-science activities.

The 1 1/2 day IRISC2011 workshop sought to explore a series of interrelated topics under two main themes: i) unambiguously identifying authors/creators & attributing their scholarly works, and ii) individual identification and access management in the context of identity federations. Specific aims of the workshop included:

• Raising overall awareness of key technical and non-technical challenges, opportunities and developments.
• Facilitating a dialogue, cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration and coordination between diverse – and largely unconnected – communities.
• Identifying & discussing existing/emerging technologies, best practices and requirements for researcher identification.

This report provides background information on key identification-related concepts & projects, describes workshop proceedings and summarizes key workshop findings

Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain

ORACLE DATABASE SECURITY

This paper presents some security issues, namely security database system level, data level security, user-level security, user management, resource management and password management. Security is a constant concern in the design and database development. Usually, there are no concerns about the existence of security, but rather how large it should be. A typically DBMS has several levels of security, in addition to those offered by the operating system or network. Typically, a DBMS has user accounts that require a login password to be authenticated to access the data.data security, password administration, Oracle HTTP Server, OracleAS, access control

Managing Dynamic User Communities in a Grid of Autonomous Resources

One of the fundamental concepts in Grid computing is the creation of Virtual Organizations (VO's): a set of resource consumers and providers that join forces to solve a common problem. Typical examples of Virtual Organizations include collaborations formed around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. To date, Grid computing has been applied on a relatively small scale, linking dozens of users to a dozen resources, and management of these VO's was a largely manual operation. With the advance of large collaboration, linking more than 10000 users with a 1000 sites in 150 counties, a comprehensive, automated management system is required. It should be simple enough not to deter users, while at the same time ensuring local site autonomy. The VO Management Service (VOMS), developed by the EU DataGrid and DataTAG projects[1, 2], is a secured system for managing authorization for users and resources in virtual organizations. It extends the existing Grid Security Infrastructure[3] architecture with embedded VO affiliation assertions that can be independently verified by all VO members and resource providers. Within the EU DataGrid project, Grid services for job submission, file- and database access are being equipped with fine- grained authorization systems that take VO membership into account. These also give resource owners the ability to ensure site security and enforce local access policies. This paper will describe the EU DataGrid security architecture, the VO membership service and the local site enforcement mechanisms Local Centre Authorization Service (LCAS), Local Credential Mapping Service(LCMAPS) and the Java Trust and Authorization Manager.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 7 pages, LaTeX, 5 eps figures. PSN TUBT00