Supporting security-oriented, collaborative nanoCMOS electronics research

Grid technologies support collaborative e-Research typified by multiple institutions and resources seamlessly shared to tackle common research problems. The rules for collaboration and resource sharing are commonly achieved through establishment and management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources by collaborators are defined and enforced by sites involved in the collaboration. The expression and enforcement of these rules is made through access control systems where roles/privileges are defined and associated with individuals as digitally signed attribute certificates which collaborating sites then use to authorize access to resources. Key to this approach is that the roles are assigned to the right individuals in the VO; the attribute certificates are only presented to the appropriate resources in the VO; it is transparent to the end user researchers, and finally that it is manageable for resource providers and administrators in the collaboration. In this paper, we present a security model and implementation improving the overall usability and security of resources used in Grid-based e-Research collaborations through exploitation of the Internet2 Shibboleth technology. This is explored in the context of a major new security focused project at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow in the nanoCMOS electronics domain

Single sign-on and authorization for dynamic virtual organizations

The vision of the Grid is to support the dynamic establishment and subsequent management of virtual organizations (VO). To achieve this presents many challenges for the Grid community with perhaps the greatest one being security. Whilst Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) provide a form of single sign-on through recognition of trusted certification authorities, they have numerous limitations. The Internet2 Shibboleth architecture and protocols provide an enabling technology overcoming some of the issues with PKIs however Shibboleth too suffers from various limitations that make its application for dynamic VO establishment and management difficult. In this paper we explore the limitations of PKIs and Shibboleth and present an infrastructure that incorporates single sign-on with advanced authorization of federated security infrastructures and yet is seamless and targeted to the needs of end users. We explore this infrastructure through an educational case study at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh

Towards trusted volunteer grid environments

Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201

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

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

Restoring Trust Relationships within Collaborative Digital Preservation Federations

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 01:00 PM – 02:30 PMThe authors extend their process for creating and establishing trust relationships to include steps for restoring trust relationships after catastrophic events. Part of this model will include best practices for business continuity relationships and will integrate trust models from Holland and Lockett (1998) and Ring and Van de Ven (1994) and how they can be applied to a process for trust restoration after periods of disaster or critical data loss. These models provide key frameworks for understanding how trust can be utilized for collaborative start points as well as for collaborative recovery points from physical natural disaster or critical data loss

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