ESP-GRID

• Project Overview
• Objectives
• Milestones
• Project Partners
• Current Status/Results 
• Publications and Presentations
• Contacts

Project Overview

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded ESP-GRID project is investigating how Shibboleth offers solutions to issues of grid authentication, authorisation and security. It will also reappraise the use of public key infrastructures within the UK e-Science Grid and grids in general and aims to produce a roadmap for integrating the e-Science Core Programme Production Grid within the JISC Information Environment (IE) . In short, is Shibboleth appropriate and workable for grids? How appropriate is PKI, even though it has already been adopted? How can the access management regime between the e-Science Grid and the JISC IE interoperate?

The overall aim of this project is to achieve a deeper understanding of the potential role that Shibboleth can play in grid authentication, authorization and security.

Objectives:

The project objective is to undertake a critical review of the GRID authentication and authorisation infrastructure. The initial stages of the project will be to review the requirements identified by the Global GRID Forum (GGF) and related bodies within the light of practical experience within the UK e-Science community and projects. The second stage involves evaluating how well PKI and Shibboleth meet those requirements. Finally the project will investigate how the results of these studies should be deployed within a GRID context and produce a roadmap and prototype of how the UK e-Science Core Programme Production GRID could co-exist within the JISC infrastructure programme.

Milestones

The main milestones of the project are:

• Critical review of the GRID authorisation infrastructure requirements in the light of practical experience within the UK e-Science programme
• Evaluation of how components of the PKI infrastructure meet those requirements
• Evaluation of how components of the Shibboleth infrastructure meet those requirements
• Establishing the functional requirements for authorisation policies and how these relate to the PKI and Shibboleth policy mechanisms
• A prototype GRID using the results of the above milestones
• Integration of the prototype within the UK production GRID and OGSA test bed projects
• Production of a roadmap for integrating the e-Science Core programme GRID within the JISC middleware infrastructure strategy

Project Partners

Oxford e-Science Centre, University of Oxford (http://e-science.ox.ac.uk/)

National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/hub)

Current Status/Results

Publications and Presentations

Publications:

ESP-GRID Proposal

ESP-GRID - Evaluation of Shibboleth and PKI for GRIDs

Shibboleth-based Access to and Usage of Grid Resources

Single Sign-on and Authorization for Dynamic Virtual Organizations

A Shibboleth-Protected Privilege Management Infrastructure for e-Science Education

Workshops:

JISC Core Middleware: developments within Security and Access Management, 20th October, 2005

JISC Core Middleware Programme Meeting, Windermere, 14th-15th November, 2005

Contacts

For more information on ESP-Grid please contact Dr Mark Norman (mark.norman@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk) or Dr Richard Sinnott (ros@dcs.gla.ac.uk)

Page updated on the 6th April 2006
Maintained by Jipu Jiang