Biblio

Federated authentication can drastically reduce the overhead of basic account maintenance while simultaneously improving overall system security. Integrating with the user's more frequently used account at their primary organization both provides a better experience to the end user and makes account compromise or changes in affiliation more likely to be noticed and acted upon. Additionally, with many organizations transitioning to multi-factor authentication for all account access, the ability to leverage external federated identity management systems provides the benefit of their efforts without the additional overhead of separately implementing a distinct multi-factor authentication process. This paper describes our experiences and the lessons we learned by enabling federated authentication with the U.S. Government PKI and In Common Federation, scaling it up to the user base of a production HPC system, and the motivations behind those choices. We have received only positive feedback from our users.

One of the challenges in a distributed data infrastructure is how users authenticate to the infrastructure, and how their authorisations are tracked. Each user community comes with its own established practices, all different, and users are put off if they need to use new, difficult tools. From the perspective of the infrastructure project, the level of assurance must be high enough, and it should not be necessary to reimplement an authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI). In the EUDAT project, we chose to implement a mostly loosely coupled approach based on the outcome of the Contrail and Unicore projects. We have preferred a practical approach, combining the outcome of several projects who have contributed parts of the puzzle. The present paper aims to describe the experiences with the integration of these parts. Eventually, we aim to have a full framework which will enable us to easily integrate new user communities and new services.