Collaboration between SAML federations and OpenStack clouds
Mihály Héder, Szabolcs Tenczer, Andrea Biancini · SoftwareX · 2019
In this paper, we present a novel OpenStack module called regsite for enabling easy access for researchers to OpenStack research clouds. Many researchers have an account in an Academic AAI federation, such as national research and education federations or the eduGAIN SAML meta-federation. The software solution presented here makes it possible to use these institutional accounts together with so-called virtual organization managers for authenticating and authorizing in OpenStack instances in a clean and secure way. An analysis of earlier generations of OpenStack-related developments trying to tackle the same problem is given. Many aspects of this software integration can be generalized to serve as a template for federative research cloud access.