ShibGrid, a Shibboleth based access method for the National Grid Service
David C. H. Wallom, Spence, Kang Tang, DJ Meredith, Jens Jensen, Anne Trefethen, M. Viljoen · 2007
Users access the National Grid Service using individual personal certificates from a trusted Certification Authority. However, the central role of the NGS in UK e-Science makes it desirable that users can use their institutional id to access Grid resources. The UK Federation is deploying a Shibboleth infrastructure to ease access from higher and further education institutions to common resources, and it is thus natural to develop Shibboleth access to the Grid in general, and the NGS in particular. Rather than going through expensive middleware refactoring, we have focused on enabling this via portals and credential conversion. This project has developed prototype software to allow users to use Shibboleth[2] to access the grid. Long term scalability is improved since authentication is also devolved from the national Grid CAs to users ’ home institutions. The existing NGS portal was taken and key components developed enabling the capabilities of both Shibboleth and the certificate based authentication to be provided through a user-friendly interface. This required certificate management tools, pluggable security modules for the transfer of Shibboleth attributes, and portlets to manage user’s Shibboleth based low assurance certificate. 1.