User Centric Identity for Grids and Clouds

Abstract

Identity federations are becoming more and more discussed and deployed as new means to proof our identity in the digital world. Both Grids and Clouds are trying to incorporate identity federations to allow for much easier access to the infrastructure, with clouds best suited due to their web based access nature. However, the more widespread use of identity federations also reveals their drawbacks and limitations, both in technology and with the legal implications. These are demonstrated using our long experience with a service included in high number of national federations. A post-federated Aditi system is then presented as a possible solution, putting users in the centre. This overcomes the legal problems and also provides a fine grain control over information directly revealed to a service provider. The Aditi architecture utilizes current SAML based identity federations as much as possible and requires only minor changes to the data flow. Therefore it can be deployed in existing national identity federations without any obstacles and cloud service provides can start to provide their services to huge amount of users who have an account in the national identity federations without initial barriers. At the end of the paper we also briefly touch the complementary problem of the trust between identity and service providers and give a short