Security for Collaborating Infrastructures  (SCI)
Draft text - V4 - 15 March 2011


1 Operational Security
 
Operational security in a distributed collaborative environment is
governed by the same principles that apply to a local centrally managed
system, but complicated by the diversity of sites (both in terms of
hardware and software systems and in terms of local policies and
practices that apply), and by the lack of a centralized management
hierarchy that can "order" certain operations to be performed in
specific ways.

Governing principles include:
- The management of risk; both to mitigate the most likely occuring and
dangerous risks, and to take counter measures that are commensurate with
the scale of the involved risks; 
- Containing the impact of a security incident while keeping services
operational, but in certain cases this may require identifying and
fixing a security vulnerability before re-enabling user access;
- Identifying the cause of incidents and understanding what measures
must be taken to prevent them from re-occurring. 

A collaborating infrastructure for operational security in a distributed
environment must address the following issues: 

Risk mitigation: A process that ensures that security patches in
operating system and application software are applied in a timely
manner, and that patch application is recorded and communicated to all
members of the collaboration. 

Risk mitigation: A documented process to manage vulnerabilities
(including reporting and disclosure) in any software distributed within
the infrastructure. This document must be publicly available or made
available upon request and must be sufficiently dynamic to respond to
changing threat environments. 

Incident prevention: The capability to detect possible intrusions and
protect the infrastructure against significant and immediate threats on
the infrastructure. 

Incident prevention: A documented capability to regulate the access of
authenticated users. 

Collaborative cooperation: The capability to identify and contact
authenticated users, service providers and resource providers. 

Collaborative cooperation: The capability to enforce the regulation of
security policies, including an escalation procedure and the powers to
require actions as deemed necessary to protect resources from or contain
the spread of an incident.


1.1	Incident Response

It is imperative that every collaborative entity has an organized
approach to addressing and managing events that threaten the security of
resources, data and overall project integrity. At a minimum a
collaborating infrastructure must have the following: 

A formal Incident Response procedure. This document must be publicly
available or made available upon request and address: roles and
responsibilities, identification and assessment of an incident,
minimizing damage, response & recovery strategies, approved
communication tools and procedures. 

Documented contact information for site security teams and expected
response times for critical situations. 

The capability to collaborate in the handling of a security incident
with affected service and resource providers, communities, and
infrastructures. 

Assurance of compliance with information sharing restrictions on
incident data obtained during collaborative investigations. If no
information sharing guidelines are specified, incident data will only be
shared with site-specific security teams on a need to know basis, and
will not be redistributed further without prior approval.

1.2 Traceability 

The aim is to be able to answer the basic questions who, what, where,
and when concerning any incident. This requires retaining all relevant
information, including timestamps and the digital identity of the user,
sufficient to identify, for each service instance, and for every
security event including at least the following: connect, authenticate,
authorize (including identity changes) and disconnect. 

A collaborating infrastructure must provide the following: 

Traceability of service usage, by the production and retention of
appropriate logging data, to identify the source of all actions as
defined above. 

A specification of the minimum data retention period, consistent with
local and international regulations. 



2. Establishing Trust between Collaborating Infrastructures
(to be written)