Developer Evaluation

In February 2006 we asked the developers from the BRIDGES and DyVOSE projects to answer a few brief questions. Contact details confirmed at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/nesc/team.html with biographies. We asked the developers to considering specifically the Shibbolizing of the Bridges web portal and DyVOSE work, and all the myriad of steps which had to be completed to make this work (PERMIS, whatever), and asked them to please identify for us:

1. what did you find difficult?
2. what makes Shibboleth a good solution for accessing a service like Bridges or the DyVOSE data?
3. what issues can you see in a real-world production of this with 100s of users, maybe a commercial data provider, issues for the future etc.?
4. what scalability issues can you identify?
5. how could the access control you've implemented be subverted by e.g. a bad person, or by an expert trying to get round the system for their own convenience, or by a careless user?

To spark some real-world flavour we used the "naively"-formed scenario:

To the developer:

Scenario: Please imagine you've by chance met a manager of a faculty resource in the corridor, and he/she knows of your experience and naively thinks you're the person who can just Shibb their target - "This afternoon, if you've time?"

Responses Received

We are extremely grateful to the following for responding so promptly to our scenario:

• Oluwafemi Ajayi
• Micha Bayer

  • (ROS: Grid/BLAST person and portlets, globus)

  • Micha: Please do bear in mind that I was only involved in this peripherally - I wrote the gridblast portlet and service which Jipu then continued to Shib-enable, so my knowledge of Shib is very limited indeed.

• Jipu Jiang
• Anthony Stell
• John Watt

The results can be seen below.

Results