1. Middleware challenges to service providers, the Nordic view TERENA, 24.10.2002 Ingrid Melve, UNINETT

2. 1 Overview ● What is happening in the Nordic countries with middleware ● Nordunet2 research initative ● GNOMIS ● FEIDE and FEIDHE ● SwUPKI and SPOCP ● Infraservices, the Nordic approach ● Distinguished academic middleware

3. 1 Learning Network

4. 1 Middleware helps us ● Have an electronic identity ● Name networked stuff, for humans to find ● Secure our communication ● May log in where access is restricted ● Keep track of networked users and components and content and stuff ● Control privacy options

5. 1 Middleware in action ● DNS: naming and resource discovery ● Multicast and traffic flow control ● Access control ● Authentication ● Authorization ● Accounting ● Policy and Quality of Service (QoS) ● Proxies: flow control, caching ● Transcoding and announcements

6. 1 Authentication and Authorization ● Logging in ● Who are you? Authentication ● What are you allowed to do? Authorization and policy ● There is no single Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) ● Scaling trust is difficult ● Bootstrapping is hard ● Do we need better security? Really?

7. 1 Nordunet2 ● Follow up on Nordunet which established the operational NORDUnet and put the Nordic countries on the network frontier ● http://www.nordunet2.org ● Focal areas ● Distance education and lifelong learning ● Tele Medicine ● Digital libraries ● Infraservices

8. 1 Infraservices is middleware ● Infraservices projects ● Directories ● Transcoding, mobile support ● GRID ● Virtual Reality support ● AA and GNOMIS ● Test networks

9. 1 GNOMIS ● The Greater Nordic Middleware Symposium: sharing the burden ● Finns have done large scale end user testing of PKI technology and smart cards ● Swedes have worked on server certificates and authorization ● Norwegians build user management systems integrated with authentication services

10. 1 FEIDE: common academic electronic ID in Norway ● Building a common electronic ID ● Standard person/user information ● Standard resource information ● Enable easy login facilities ● Building blocks ● Username/password in schema ● Legal issues wrangled once ● PKI, possibly support for smart cards ● Common authentication service ● Establish a common authorization service

11. 1 FEIDHE/HSTYA ● Investigate possibilities for implementing a smart card based electronic identification ● Testing smart cards in applications ● User authentication ● Digital signatures ● Deployment steps recommended ● Make related modifications to the user administration ● Deploy services relying on PKI ● Distribute smart cards to the users

12. 1 SwUPKI ● Swedish University PKI ● PKI used (mostly) for server certificates ● 5 participating universities (so far) ● Sample policies available, easy to join ● Affordable certificates ● Operations and policy decisions are separated on top level Certification Authority

13. 1 SPOCP test ● Simple Policy Control Project ● 5 swedish universities, Sunet and Uninett ● Testing policy control server for authorization ● Centralized authorization ● Support for Access Control List descriptions

14. 1 How are universities different ● Heterogenous software ● Open solutions, no inside/outside (students inside are more dangerous than the outside), few firewalls ● Loosely coupled systems ● Some are large scale, most have transient user populations ● Hard to establish organizational policy that works for all (a professor may do as she wants)

15. 1 How is university middleware similar ● Security issues are the same whereever you go ● Getting users to behave ● Protecting the prey: users and servers ● Keeping track of who is allowed to do what ● BUT: universities are similar to the Internet at large, not to enterprise networks

16. 1 Summing up ● Nordic area is collaborating on solving middleware challenges ● Middleware makes networked life more complex ● Middleware is on its way ● Directories of information ● Software on servers and clients ● Policy and formal agreements ● We have work to do on the NRN level ● Contact: ● ingrid.melve@uninett.no, ingrid.melve@uninett.no ● gnomis@uninett.no