EAGER: GENI Security Review

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The NSF's Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) embodies a key aspect of next generation Cyber Infrastructure, heterogenity: it is a diverse set of resources with differing implementations of common interfaces, owned and operated by multiple organizations. It is an early example of a federated cloud computing infrastructure. Federated infrastructure and the on-going adoption of networking and information technology that touches on almost every aspect of our society, as activities relating to commerce, government, research, education, health care, critical infrastructure, etc., means that we need a principled and well-grounded understanding of the security properties and security architecture that are deeply integrated with and pervade such infrastructure. Using GENI as an example, this project is developing a top level sketch of the security issues of a federated infrastructure. The project has two tasks: the first is to review, analyze and document entities, operations and relationships among them with security relevance in the GENI Architecture and GENI Software Prototypes; the second is to analyze the current security capabilities of GENI vis-a-vis current and future requirements likely to be levied against the security architecture. The output of these tasks will inform the development and use of federated infrastructure and guide next steps towards building a secure federated Cyber Infrastructure.