SciTokens SSH: Token-based Authentication for Remote Login to Scientific Computing Environments

You Alex Gao, Jim Basney, Alex Withers · Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing · 2020

SciTokens SSH is a pluggable authentication module (PAM) that uses JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for authentication to the Secure Shell (SSH) remote login service. SciTokens SSH supports multiple token issuers with local token verification, so scientific computing providers are not forced to rely on a single OAuth server for token issuance and verification. The decentralized design for SciTokens SSH was motivated by the distributed nature of scientific computing environments, where scientists use computational resources from multiple providers, with a variety of security policies, distributed across the globe.

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