eScience 2009 (Oxford, UK)

I’m currently at eScience 2009 in Oxford. I’ll present my paper on Friday and try to keep loose track of things via my twitter timeline. Follow me if you want, my paper’s abstract is below.

Design and Implementation of a Grid Proxy Auditing Infrastructure

Christopher Kunz, Christian Szongott, Jan Wiebelitz, Christian Grimm
Regional Computing Center for Lower Saxony
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet
Hannover, Germany
{kunz,szongott,wiebelitz,grimm}@rvs.uni-hannover.de

Abstract

Single sign-on and delegation of rights are key requirements
for modern Grid infrastructures. These requirements
are usually facilitated by X.509 und Private-Key Infrastructures
(PKI) and proxy certificates. Proxy certificates, however,
can be obtained and abused by a malicious third party.
There is currently no method for end users to detect such
abuse.
We have designed a solution that enables a thorough auditing
of Grid proxy usage in Globus-based Grids and
implemented a service that accepts auditing information
via a web service interface and saves them to a back-end
database. We introduce modifications to the Grid Security
Infrastructure that allow sending audit trails from within
Globus components if the user desires to track credential usage.
A web-based front-end shows all logged information.
With our approach, expert users can now closely monitor
how their credentials are used after job submission. This
will help build trust in Grid infrastructures and delegated
authentication and authorization.