26,266 research outputs found
SciTokens: Capability-Based Secure Access to Remote Scientific Data
The management of security credentials (e.g., passwords, secret keys) for
computational science workflows is a burden for scientists and information
security officers. Problems with credentials (e.g., expiration, privilege
mismatch) cause workflows to fail to fetch needed input data or store valuable
scientific results, distracting scientists from their research by requiring
them to diagnose the problems, re-run their computations, and wait longer for
their results. In this paper, we introduce SciTokens, open source software to
help scientists manage their security credentials more reliably and securely.
We describe the SciTokens system architecture, design, and implementation
addressing use cases from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration and the Large Synoptic Survey
Telescope (LSST) projects. We also present our integration with widely-used
software that supports distributed scientific computing, including HTCondor,
CVMFS, and XrootD. SciTokens uses IETF-standard OAuth tokens for
capability-based secure access to remote scientific data. The access tokens
convey the specific authorizations needed by the workflows, rather than
general-purpose authentication impersonation credentials, to address the risks
of scientific workflows running on distributed infrastructure including NSF
resources (e.g., LIGO Data Grid, Open Science Grid, XSEDE) and public clouds
(e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure). By improving the
interoperability and security of scientific workflows, SciTokens 1) enables use
of distributed computing for scientific domains that require greater data
protection and 2) enables use of more widely distributed computing resources by
reducing the risk of credential abuse on remote systems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced
Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US
Secure Data Sharing With AdHoc
In the scientific circles, there is pressing need to form temporary and dynamic collaborations to share diverse resources (e.g. data, an access to services, applications or various instruments). Theoretically, the traditional grid technologies respond to this need with the abstraction of a Virtual Organization (VO). In practice its procedures are characterized by latency, administrative overhead and are inconvenient to its users.
We would like to propose the Manifesto for Secure Sharing. The main postulate is that users should be able to share data and resources by themselves without any intervention on the system administrator's side. In addition, operating an intuitive interface does not require IT skills.
AdHoc is a resource sharing interface designed for users willing to share data or computational resources within seconds and almost effortlessly. The AdHoc application is built on the top of traditional security frameworks, such as the PKI X.509 certificate scheme, Globus GSI, gLite VOMS and Shibboleth. It enables users rapid and secure collaboration
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