Federated Identity Management for Grids

Identity federation is a novel technology allowing end users’ identity information and preferences to be communicated between service providers. While in complete control over what personal information is interchanged, the users benefit from identity federation in several ways, e.g. the services can be tailored according to the users’ preferences and all the services can be accessed by logging in once to the community of collaborating service providers. Computing Grids have recently gained popularity in the research community because of the superior capacity of computation they offer. This characteristic is ideal for solving complex problems that consume exceptional amounts of computing resources. Using current Grid middleware requires, however, fairly proficient computing skills thus exluding out less experienced but nonetheless potential users. We explore the possibilities to combine identity federation and Grid services in order to simplify the usage of Grids and thus lower the barrier of entrance for Grid usage. Our prototype implementation leverages the identity federation standards and provides a simple and secure end user interface to Grid services.