31,061 research outputs found
A Mediated Definite Delegation Model allowing for Certified Grid Job Submission
Grid computing infrastructures need to provide traceability and accounting of
their users" activity and protection against misuse and privilege escalation. A
central aspect of multi-user Grid job environments is the necessary delegation
of privileges in the course of a job submission. With respect to these generic
requirements this document describes an improved handling of multi-user Grid
jobs in the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") Grid Services. A security
analysis of the ALICE Grid job model is presented with derived security
objectives, followed by a discussion of existing approaches of unrestricted
delegation based on X.509 proxy certificates and the Grid middleware gLExec.
Unrestricted delegation has severe security consequences and limitations, most
importantly allowing for identity theft and forgery of delegated assignments.
These limitations are discussed and formulated, both in general and with
respect to an adoption in line with multi-user Grid jobs. Based on the
architecture of the ALICE Grid Services, a new general model of mediated
definite delegation is developed and formulated, allowing a broker to assign
context-sensitive user privileges to agents. The model provides strong
accountability and long- term traceability. A prototype implementation allowing
for certified Grid jobs is presented including a potential interaction with
gLExec. The achieved improvements regarding system security, malicious job
exploitation, identity protection, and accountability are emphasized, followed
by a discussion of non- repudiation in the face of malicious Grid jobs
Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies
Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use
of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed
by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of
data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across
organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and
deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless
computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid
environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of
which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This
chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and
Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE
as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on
the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features
is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
BlockPKI: An Automated, Resilient, and Transparent Public-Key Infrastructure
This paper describes BlockPKI, a blockchain-based public-key infrastructure
that enables an automated, resilient, and transparent issuance of digital
certificates. Our goal is to address several shortcomings of the current TLS
infrastructure and its proposed extensions. In particular, we aim at reducing
the power of individual certification authorities and make their actions
publicly visible and accountable, without introducing yet another trusted third
party. To demonstrate the benefits and practicality of our system, we present
evaluation results and describe our prototype implementation.Comment: Workshop on Blockchain and Sharing Economy Application
TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art
There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms
User oriented access to secure biomedical resources through the grid
The life science domain is typified by heterogeneous data sets that are evolving at an exponential rate. Numerous post-genomic databases and areas of post-genomic life science research have been established and are being actively explored. Whilst many of these databases are public and freely accessible, it is often the case that researchers have data that is not so freely available and access to this data needs to be strictly controlled when distributed collaborative research is undertaken. Grid technologies provide one mechanism by which access to and integration of federated data sets is possible. Combining such data access and integration technologies with fine grained security infrastructures facilitates the establishment of virtual organisations (VO). However experience has shown that the general research (non-Grid) community are not comfortable with the Grid and its associated security models based upon public key infrastructures (PKIs). The Internet2 Shibboleth technology helps to overcome this through users only having to log in to their home site to gain access to resources across a VO â or in Shibboleth terminology a federation. In this paper we outline how we have applied the combination of Grid technologies, advanced security infrastructures and the Internet2 Shibboleth technology in several biomedical projects to provide a user-oriented model for secure access to and usage of Grid resources. We believe that this model may well become the de facto mechanism for undertaking e-Research on the Grid across numerous domains including the life sciences
User-oriented security supporting inter-disciplinary life science research across the grid
Understanding potential genetic factors in disease or development of personalised e-Health solutions require scientists to access a multitude of data and compute resources across the Internet from functional genomics resources through to epidemiological studies. The Grid paradigm provides a compelling model whereby seamless access to these resources can be achieved. However, the acceptance of Grid technologies in this domain by researchers and resource owners must satisfy particular constraints from this community - two of the most critical of these constraints being advanced security and usability. In this paper we show how the Internet2 Shibboleth technology combined with advanced authorisation infrastructures can help address these constraints. We demonstrate the viability of this approach through a selection of case studies across the complete life science spectrum
A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture
Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on
centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and
third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting
from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in
the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to
manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different
contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple
unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental
constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote
privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we
then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of
distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate
many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for
digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not
seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to
achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly
encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can
potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests,
individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its
benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table
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