JISC

The Final Report for this project is available here

Overview

Whilst the Grid community has broadly adopted approaches based upon X.509 digital certificates to support authentication, authorisation remains an area without a dominant standard, and which presents substantial usability problems to resource owners and users.

Semantic technologies can support lightweight expression of access policies, extending the way in which access decisions can ultimately be made. In many scenarios, the information needed to make a local access decision comes from a variety of sources. Examples include resource sharing, quota management of distributed resources, or identifying security policy conflicts in the case where an individual holds roles in two different Virtual Organisations.

Aims and objectives

• Develop prototype reasoner and authorisation ontology Identify application domains and elaborate use-cases. Application areas include access to astronomical, biomedical and nanoelectronic resources,
• Produce demonstrators in the application areas to validate design
• Dissemination: journal articles, documents in relevant application domains, and JISC final report

Project methodology

The PI at Leicester will produce an initial version of the semantic Policy Decision Point (PDP), specifying overall architecture and APIs. Then, in parallel, project staff at Leicester and Glasgow will elaborate the use-cases outlined in the project proposal, producing detailed scenarios and validating the PDP API, then, with the assistance of the PI, integrating these with the prototype API.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Production of prototype semantic PDP
• Use-case documents describing the range of application authorisation scenarios and their implementation using the ontology-based PDP

Technology / Standards used (if applicable)

• Security technologies: X.509 certificates; LDAP and SAML for identity assertions, as appropriate; OpenID if appropriate
• Semantic technologies: RDF, RDF Schema, OWL; RDF/OWL libraries such as Jena or Sesame

Lead institution

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester

Project partners

NeSC, University of Glasgow