CC*IIE IAM: FeduShare: Bridging Campus and Research Identity and Access Management for Self-Managed Collaboration

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

Scientific challenges are often addressed by a team of people from multiple science disciplines, institutions and geographic locations. These teams use computation, communication and data resources scattered across many sites or institutions. Because of the need to authorize access to these resources, it is currently a non-trivial problem for a team to set up the needed working environment, and that problem delays research projects and consumes time and other resources. The sources of difficulties include: campus and research communities are familiar with their own Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions but are not familiar with the entire solution space; general purpose solution software has been developed in different environments but adoption outside the original environment has been limited; and members of domain science teams are not expert in distributed systems integration. This project is designing a system architecture supporting self-managed collaboration and federation of services named "FeduShare". The FeduShare framework builds on existing Identity Management solutions such as the InCommon federation, Shibboleth servers and the GENI solutions for people/resource management/authorization that build upon them. Case studies used to inform the investigation include InCommon based logins for shell-based access to campus computing clusters, and the integration with identity management in GENI for the purposes of establishing seamless end-to-end communication paths.