Speaker
Description
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) resources provide services for research communities through various grid middleware and cloud platforms.
These services use X509 certificates for user authentication and authorisation (AA) purposes. A growing number both of existing and prospective EGI user communities consider personal certificate-based access as a significant barrier to infrastructure uptake.
Some of these communities (together with their supporting NGIs, NRENs and scientific projects) are developing their own solutions to simplify or even hide the certificate based Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) from their users.
This workshop will build on the good progress made at the 2012 EGI Technical Forum. It aims to bring together the various communities and bodies active in this field. Several user communities are building prototype solutions and others will have plans or requirements in this area. Via the workshop we can share our experiences since Sep 2012 and the technologies being used so we can identify areas for reuse (whether architecture, APIs or pluggable components) across the NGIs.
The workshop should comprise three sessions, starting with some talks from the various existing infrastructures, some talks on requirements from those who are looking to produce a new solution in the near future, and a discussion session where we can ascertain what is the best way to move forward with the document produced at the 2012 EGI TF workshop and prevent future re-inventing of the wheel.
Summary
This workshop aims to bring together the various communities working on federated identity management solutions that simplify or hide from their users their certificate-based authentication and authorisation infrastructure.
The objective will be to share our experiences and technologies so we can identify areas for reuse (whether architecture, APIs or pluggable components) across the NGIs.
Impact
It was clear at the last workshop that there were several communities setting up software that on the face of it seemed to be offering similar things. While it also became clear that there were some fundamental differences in design there was still some hope that we could move forward and aim for a common architecture. Since then the organisers have become aware of other communities and it is hoped that these too can present their work and join the effort for more a more common approach.
