1. Supporting education and research Security and Authentication for the Grid Alan Robiette, JISC Development Group

2. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC2 Outline Scope of the problem The changing context of Grid middleware The Grid Security Task Force Current issues Ways forward

3. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC3 Aspects of security Managing access within a generally approved community Registration; authentication; authorisation (plus logging/accounting) Defence against completely unauthorised intrusion Asset valuation; risk/threat analysis; countermeasures

4. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC4 Grid middleware In a state of transition Globus Toolkit 2: in fairly widespread use but now obsolescent OGSI/Globus Toolkit 3: first steps towards industry web services (but now deprecated) WSRF/Globus Toolkit 4: full move to web services (but not there yet) Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) using basic interoperable web services for the time being

5. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC5 Securing web services WS-Security white paper by IBM and Microsoft, April 2002 Lower level services based on existing standards (TLS, XML-DSig, XML-Encryption) Extensions to SOAP to define security for SOAP messages Complex higher layer architecture

6. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC6 WS-Security architecture © IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation (2002)

7. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC7 WS-Security: progress Being standardised by OASIS, see http://www.oasis-open.org http://www.oasis-open.org Basic WS-Security layer profiles now stable (for X.509 tokens) Work on other tokens in the pipeline Still a long way to go on higher level services...

8. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC8 Authentication In a sense a solved problem All generations of Grid middleware use X.509 identity certificates as security tokens –Including initial implementations of WS- Security In the UK, certificates issued by Grid Support Centre's certificate authority Works well within its design goals, but –Some issues with usability (of certificates in general): can these be circumvented? –Likely future issues with scalability

9. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC9 Authorisation Dealing with virtual organisations Across boundaries of real organisations In a real sense the key problem in Grid security Initial Globus mechanism (mapfile) very crude Labour-intensive for sysadmins, doesn't scale well Many other schemes proposed VOM, VOMS, CAS, Akenti, Permis...

10. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC10 GGF authorisation API GGF working group to design a standard authorisation API Wide range of experts JISC funded UK involvement Allows plug-in replacement of any scheme conforming to this API Written and due to be tested for GT3 But reusable in a web services context?

11. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC11 Defending against attacks Credential theft How serious a problem is this? Usability problems with certificates don't make for good user behaviour General security vulnerabilities Something of a worry with research- grade code Earlier Globus versions caused many problems with institutional firewalls Web services avoids this; but pushes the problem elsewhere

12. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC12 Grid Security Task Force Part of the e-Science core programme support structure Reports to Technical Advisory Group Membership from the academic/research community and from industry Contains both practitioners and security researchers Specifically includes a human factors expert

13. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC13 What has STF done? Developed a security policy for the e-Science programme(s) Research Councils, DTI etc. have all signed up to this Formulating a policy highlighted new operational needs for the programme Incident management function (cf. CERT) Advice to projects (possibly also audit) Grid Operations Centre will include both

14. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC14 Other STF work Technical road map and gap analysis Has informed JISC call for security work in early 2004, also EPSRC and OMII calls for new work in this area Initial scoping/drafting work on two further papers Advice to proposal writers and PIs Human factors (“socio-technical”) gap analysis

15. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC15 Main issues today The transitional state of Grid middleware How much do we need to worry about GT2 and OGSI? Slow progress of WS-Security upper layers Stick to simple WS-Security scenarios and make sure we get these right Usability/scalability issues with certificates?

16. 18 May 2004Cross-RC Conference, NeSC16 Federating identities It may be preferable for the user to authenticate in his/her own institutional environment Then spawn a short-lived Grid credential E.g. KX509, which does this for Kerberos Alternatively could use Shibboleth-type model where identity and attributes are asserted by institution to service provider Would this work in a Grid world? And would it provide adequate security?

17. Supporting education and research Questions?