Content about Security

Michael Hortmann, a leading expert in cryptography from the University of Bremen will be chairing a session on cryptography and security at this year’s International Supercomputing ’13 conference.

Announcement - Open Source Tools Released by RESERVOIR to Support Cloud Deployment and Usage

Image courtesy RESERVOIR

Several key components of the RESERVOIR architecture are being released as open source middleware you can download from the RESERVOIR website and integrate to build your own open source cloud infrastructure.
The Claudia platform offers a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public, private or hybrid IaaS cloud. It provides a Dashboard and a standard TCloud API based on OVF to support provisioning of PaaS and SaaS. The Claudia platform is available through the Morfeo open source community.
The Claudia platform can also be integrated with the OpenNebula cloud management framework. OpenNebula is an open source toolkit, with excellent performance and scalability to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, with high integration capabilities to fit into any existing data center, and with the most advanced functionality for b

Feature - ARGUS keeps a sure watch always

Upon the death of Argus, Hera honored her faithful watchman by gathering his many eyes and placing them on the tail of a peacock. Image courtesy Gari.Baldi, under Creative Commons license.

In classical Greek mythology, a multi-eyed, insomniac giant named “Argus” was employed by Hera to keep an eye on the doings of her husband Zeus — mightiest of gods.
Argus was extremely vigilant; an ancient poet wrote that “. . . sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.”
So it was appropriate that “ARGUS” became the name of a newly created authorization service to observe and protect Europe’s grid infrastructure. Overseen by the European Grid Infrastructure (which is in turn coordinated by the European Grid Initiative), ARGUS is designed to be a secure and efficient means of offering a single authorization and authentication point for multiple services.
ARGUS works in a series of s

Feature - The security-accessibility tug-o-war

Rajasthani women take part in tug of war game at Pushkar fair, in India's desert state of Rajasthan.
Image courtesy of Sumith Meher, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the tug-o-war between security and ease of use, priorities can vary widely. But if there is a sweet spot, Mine Altunay is going to find it.
“We’re trying to understand how we can provide end-to-end infrastructure that is secure enough but easy enough to use,” said Altunay, who is Open Science Grid’s security officer.
Altunay began the process by running a joint OSG-ESnet workshop on identity management last November, where they sought input from users and a small number of resource providers.
“We wanted to touch bases with our user community and we wanted to understand how this process is working for the end user,” Altunay explained.
What they found is that the current process is too complicated and time consuming for end users. In order to sign int

SAFE-BioPharma - A new domain standard for secure identity

Mollie Shields-Uehling, pictured above, is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association. Image courtesy Mollie Shields-Uehling.

In medical and pharmaceutical research, researchers deal with sensitive private information on a daily basis. That makes secure identity management a crucial need. Mollie Shields-Uehling is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association, a non-profit organization charged with creating a standard that meets that need.
iSGTW: Thank you for joining us for this discussion, Mollie. Could you tell us a little bit about SAFE-BioPharma?
Shields-Uehling: SAFE-BioPharma Association is a non-profit industry collaboration established by the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies to develop and maintain a global interoperable digital identity and signature standard for the biopharmaceutical and healthcare communities. The purpose of the standard is to allow the transformation of business and regulatory process to

Nice to meet you, authentically

Famed Australian cricket player Neil Harvey (right) shaking hands at the start of the 1950/51 Test series between England and Australia. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

We all know that authentication is a must when using grid resources but how much do we really know about it? Jens Jensen from the UK's Science and Technologies Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (STFC RAL) explains, using as a case history his own experience in working as part of that country’s Certificate Authority — one of the largest in the world.
 
If you have ever used the grid, then you know that you “shake hands” with a resource using a certificate — a “digital passport” which identifies you to the resource. In turn, the resource also sends a certificate of its own to you (but which you will most likely see only if something goes wrong).Why authenticate?
When you access any valuable resource, whether it’

Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Image courtesystock.exchng

When it comes to money laundering, crime really does pay. An estimated 1 trillion US dollars is laundered annually worldwide by criminals moving dirty money around in an attempt to cover up the origins of their cash.
The AMONG (Anti money laundering in Grid) Business Experiment from BEinGRID is set to stop such crooks in their tracks.
AMONG is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. Currently, banks track suspicious behavior with AML systems set up within their own individual institution, with communication between banks initiated only in the case of an anomaly. But this approach can only detect simple cases of fraud.
“Money laundering cannot be dealt with when you look only within one organization,” says Kostas Tserpes from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), a partner in the project. “By default, the person doing money l

Project develops new standards for sharing between grids

Authorization Interoperability Project members , left to right, Oscar Koeroo (NIKHEF), Gabriele Garzoglio (Fermi National Accelerator Lab), and Frank Siebenlist (Argonne National Laboratory). Photo courtesy Open Science Grid.

Although the Grid is all about resource sharing, the software that governs individual grids has not always been capable of interacting well. The Grid Authorization Interoperability Project has created a new standard that could change that.
Grids make their computational and storage resources available online for use by others through software known as gateway middleware. To access a grid, a user presents her credentials—certification that she has rights to access that grid’s resources—to a resource gateway. The gateway in turn talks to an authorization system, local to the grid the user is accessing, in order to assign the appropriate privileges to the user.
Most grids have independently d

Opinion - A matter of trust: enabling grid security through bilateral negotiation Diagram of a fraud: Here, Alice is a maliciousagent who collected as much information as possible on Bob who disclosed his SEC certificate on step 4. Alice did not commit to the end of the interaction todisclose her credential in step 5. If Alice is a clever hacker, she could then impersonate Bob and start fraudulent activities. Image courtesy of Winslett, 2006 (Our latest opinion piece comes from a team at the University of Westminster.) One of the key challenges posed in Virtual Organizations (VO)—which are the core components of the grid—is establishing trust relationships between a grid service provider and a consumer. A key aspect of a VO is the ability to provide access to computers, software, data and other resources. This sharing is highly controlled, with resource providers and consumers explicitly outlining what is shared, who is allowed to share, and the conditions under which sharing takes place. However, introducing intellig

Feature - Security through collaboration, part I: Today’s cyber security climate Once, most attacks on computer systems were committed by individuals, motivated by ego gratification, greed or revenge. But as computing resources increase in size and complexity, cyberattacks are increasingly the work of criminal organizations and hostile governments, motivated by large-scale illicit financial profit, sabotage, and espionage.Image courtesy of NCSA. Randal Butler, Co-Director of the CyberSecurity Directorate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois , contributed this article, the first of a two-part series.The grid offers many advantages for computing, as we all know. But it offers one singular disadvantage: a grid is only as strong as its least secure site. The cyber attacks we see today typically span multiple systems, sites and even countries, as attackers use increasingly sophisticated methods both to gain access and to obfuscate their location. FBI sources tell us that today’s att

Announcement - OnTheMove federated conference, Mexico, 9-14 Nov Image courtesy of starlab.vub.ac.be  Dates: 9-14 November 2008Location: Monterrey, MexicoWeb page Registration OnTheMove (OTM) returns to the North American continent co-locating five related and complementary conferences: DOA: infrastructure, ODBASE: meaning of data, CoopIS: application in organizations, GADA: grid computing, high-performance and distributed applications, IS: information security. All five conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting application-pull created by the Web. For DOA'08, the primary emphasis will be on the distributed objects underlying the required archtitectures; ODBASE'08 concentrates on the knowledge bases and methods required for enabling semantical use; CoopIS'08 will report on the state of the art on interaction of such technology and methods within an enterprise or networked organization; and for GADA'08, the fo

  Image of the week - Heavenly solutions Sergio Andreozzi is a researcher delving into the balance beween grid security and ease of accessibility, and he is working as part of the OMII-Europe team on standards. He is also a photographer, and when he saw this wall painting on the facade of a building in Portland, Oregon, he just could not resist the symbolism. For more on the topic of grid security, see this week’s feature on Securing the multi-platform grid. Image courtesy of Sergio Andreozzi, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), CNAF