CICI: CE: SciTokens: Capability-Based Secure Access to Remote Scientific Data

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The management of security credentials such as passwords and secret keys for computational science workflows is a burden for scientists and information security officers. Problems with security credentials (e.g., expiration, privilege mismatch) cause the workflows to fail to fetch needed input data or store valuable scientific results, distracting scientists from their research by requiring them to diagnose the problems, re-run their computations, and wait longer for their results. In an effort to avoid these problems, scientists often use long-lived, highly-privileged credentials (e.g., enabling the workflow to fully impersonate their identity), increasing risks to their accounts and to the underlying computational infrastructure and resulting in complexity for information security officers managing the infrastructure. The SciTokens project delivers open source software to help scientists manage their security credentials more reliably and securely. The project includes participants from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project to ensure relevance and facilitate adoption. Integration with the widely-used HTCondor software and collaboration with Open Science Grid and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) facilitates adoption by the wider scientific community. To address the challenges and risks of managing security credentials for scientific workflows, the SciTokens project delivers an open source software infrastructure that uses IETF-standard Open Authorization (OAuth) tokens for capability-based secure access to remote scientific data. SciTokens uses OAuth refresh tokens, maintained securely on the submission node, to delegate short-lived, least-privilege OAuth access tokens to scientific workflows, to enable their remote data access. The access tokens convey the specific authorizations needed by the workflows, rather than general-purpose authentication impersonation credentials. These least-privilege authorization tokens help to address the risks of scientific workflows running on distributed infrastructure including NSF resources (e.g., LIGO Data Grid, Open Science Grid, XSEDE) and public clouds (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure). By improving the interoperability and security of scientific workflows, the SciTokens project 1) enables use of distributed computing for scientific domains that require greater data protection and 2) enables use of more widely distributed computing resources by reducing the risk of credential abuse on remote systems.