ESP-GRID Wiki

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Evaluation of Shibboleth and PKI for Grids project, (ESP-GRID), based at the University of Oxford.

Wiki managed by Mark Norman and Alun Edwards, July 2005-

Welcome to the ESP-GRID wiki!

Here you will find most of the output from our project. Firstly you may wish to have a look at our [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~markn/ESPGRID/ESPMainProjPlan1_0.pdf original project plan]. We've varied from it only a little, so the main aims have been addressed.

Our first main deliverable was to investigate the requirements for access management for grids in general. This proved more difficult than anticipated, but we now have a host of resources, if you're thinking of looking into this area yourself:

The next work of the project was to evaluate how relevant are Shibboleth and (separately) client-based PKI to these general requirements. Some further work on the PKI part is anticipated from Matthew Dovey, but a comparison document was prepared mostly addressing the use of Shibboleth, but also looking at the shortcomings of client based PKI. This document is named ShibEvaluation (but also addresses PKI).

We have also done a brief survey of Policy Management technologies and related issues. This document examines methodologies for managing the access management policies between users' home domains, VOs and grids. See PolicyManagementAndExchange for details. (Please note that this document is not yet complete, as we would like feedback from some of those projects that we have written about.)

The project began a collaboration with the NeSC team at Glasgow. This was to build demonstrators of Shibbolized access to grid resources and applications. This has been largely completed and is discussed further at the ["NeSC Shibbolized Resources"] page, from where access to a demonstrator that you can try out is anticipated soon.

Richard Sinnott, of the NeSC team, described the work at GGF 16 (at Athens in February 2006). While we were there, a discussion within the [http://www.ggf.org/gf/event_schedule/index.php?id=213 Grid and Shib Investigators' (BOF) meeting] showed that there was some confusion regarding the nature of what is exactly a Virtual Organisation (VO)? As a consequence of this discussion, we produced some thoughts entitled [:VODefinition:Towards a definition of a VO]. This is currently a topic of debate on the [http://www.federation.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shibgrid-bof GGF shibgrid-bof] mailing list.

Final evaluation: As we come towards the end of our project, we begin to self-evaluate our work and to get feedback from data owners, users and developers of the demonstrators. See the EvaluationPages for details as this work is carried out.

We are also expected to produce recommendations and possibly a roadmap for the UK e-Science community with regard to the use of Shibboleth in future. To this end, a ["Final recommendations for e-Science"] page is currently being prepared. Our anticipation is that a roadmap would be too prescriptive at this stage, but a list of recommendations would be appropriate.

ESP-GRID Work Packages

GridRequirements Requirements gathering from literature and focus group

ShibEvaluation Evaluating the possible role of Shibboleth with grids.

PolicyManagementAndExchange - Looking at methodologies for managing the access management policies between users home domains, VOs and grids.

[:VODefinition:Towards a definition of a VO] an initial discussion document following GGF16 (Athens) where this knotty problem was aired honestly.

EvaluationPages - These are pages where we intend building an evaluation of the project outcomes and findings.

(For Alun and Mark), see FinalWorkplan for last few months' work.

We have a page of MeetingNotes, including conferences attended and meetings with collaborators.

Quick starting points and links:

For guidance as to how to find your way around and to add information to this wiki, see the InitialGuidance.