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

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

Making the Distribution Subsystem Secure

This report presents how the Distribution Subsystem is made secure. A set of different security threats to a shared data programming system are identifed. The report presents the extensions nessesary to the DSS in order to cope with the identified security threats by maintaining reference security. A reference to a shared data structure cannot be forged or guessed; only by proper delegation can a thread acquire access to data originating at remote processes. Referential security is a requirement for secure distributed applications. By programmatically restricting access to distributed data to trusted nodes, a distributed application can be made secure. However, for this to be true, referential security must be supported on the level of the implementation

A Security Framework for JXTA-Overlay

En l'actualitat, la maduresa del camp de la investigació P2P empès a través de nous problemes, relacionats amb la seguretat. Per aquesta raó, la seguretat comença a convertir-se en una de les qüestions clau en l'avaluació d'un sistema P2P, i és important proporcionar mecanismes de seguretat per a sistemes P2P. El projecte JXTAOverlay fa un esforç per utilitzar la tecnologia JXTA per proporcionar un conjunt genèric de funcions que poden ser utilitzades pels desenvolupadors per desplegar aplicacions P2P. No obstant això, encara que el seu disseny es va centrar en qüestions com ara l'escalabilitat o el rendiment general, no va tenir en compte la seguretat. Aquest treball proposa un marc de seguretat, adaptat específicament a la idiosincràsia del JXTAOverlay.At present time, the maturity of P2P research field has pushed through new problems such us those related with security. For that reason, security starts to become one of the key issues when evaluating a P2P system and it is important to provide security mechanisms to P2P systems. The JXTAOverlay project is an effort to use JXTA technology to provide a generic set of functionalities that can be used by developers to deploy P2P applications. However, since its design focused on issues such as scalability or overall performance, it did not take security into account. This work proposes a security framework specifically suited to JXTAOverlay¿s idiosyncrasies.En la actualidad, la madurez del campo de la investigación P2P empujado a través de nuevos problemas, relacionados con la seguridad. Por esta razón, la seguridad comienza a convertirse en una de las cuestiones clave en la evaluación de un sistema P2P, y es importante proporcionar mecanismos de seguridad para sistemas P2P. El proyecto JXTAOverlay hace un esfuerzo por utilizar la tecnología JXTA para proporcionar un conjunto genérico de funciones que pueden ser utilizadas por los desarrolladores para desplegar aplicaciones P2P. Sin embargo, aunque su diseño se centró en cuestiones como la escalabilidad o el rendimiento general, no tuvo en cuenta la seguridad. Este trabajo propone un marco de seguridad, adaptado específicamente a la idiosincrasia del JXTAOverlay

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

Considerations on command and response language features for a network of heterogeneous autonomous computers

The design of a uniform command language to be used in a local area network of heterogeneous, autonomous nodes is considered. After examining the major characteristics of such a network, and after considering the profile of a scientist using the computers on the net as an investigative aid, a set of reasonable requirements for the command language are derived. Taking into account the possible inefficiencies in implementing a guest-layered network operating system and command language on a heterogeneous net, the authors examine command language naming, process/procedure invocation, parameter acquisition, help and response facilities, and other features found in single-node command languages, and conclude that some features may extend simply to the network case, others extend after some restrictions are imposed, and still others require modifications. In addition, it is noted that some requirements considered reasonable (user accounting reports, for example) demand further study before they can be efficiently implemented on a network of the sort described