Towards cross-middleware authentication and single sign-on for ARC Grid middleware

Abstract

When pursuing the task of making access to Grids as simple as possible, security is one of the most important challenges in production Grid infrastructures, especially when the Grid applications span multiple administrative domains as well as heterogeneous Grid middlewares. A typical example is wide scale e-Science applications which need to coordinate resources shared among a number of independent institutions with different Grid middlewares deployed on these resources. In this paper, we describe security implementation and considerations used in the upcoming version of the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) middleware, where the heterogeneity issue has been addressed. The main goal of ARC implementation in terms of security is to let the middleware be capable of interoperating with other Grid middlewares by leveraging on standard specifications. The key aspect of the work is to enhance the current proxy certificate based authentication and single sign-on by utilizing and enhancing the standardized Web Service specifications such as Security Assertion Markup Languages (SAML), single sign-on (SSO) profile and Web Services Security in order to achieve cross-middleware authentication and single sign-on.