[caops-wg] OGSA activity to cover authentication and identity provision roadmap

[Alan Sill]

I'd like to suggest to the CAOps and Grid CA community that we  
attempt to pull together thoughts on grid identity authentication in  
terms of a roadmap and/or BOF among interested parties, focusing  
primarily on the AuthN side. This would be a complement to the OGSA- 
AuthZ activity, which we could clearly call OGSA-AuthN.

I realize that we need another working group like, well, a whack on  
the head, but I have thought about this one a lot and I think that  
the OGSA process would bring a lot of rationalization to the  
activities and effort that we are pursuing more or less piecemeal in  
the search for a workable solution.  Among things that we could gain  
by having such an effort, we could include:

- Clear separation from OGSA-AuthZ while still allowing a strong  
channel for communication
- Bringing together several different working groups who are all  
working on identity provision (as opposed to authorization) for grids
- Providing for better communication between the OGSA roadmap and  
CAOps practices
- Providing a context for working groups, such as the Bridge CA and  
Shibboleth activities, to communicate their findings
- Placing OGSA-AuthN and OGSA-AuthZ on a similar footing

To follow through on this, I would like to have a brief discussion in  
the IGTF portion of the upcoming EUGridPMA meeting, followed by a  
similar discussion at the TAGPMA Novemvber face-to-face, and of  
course encourage similar discussion at the APGridPMA meeting this  
fall.  Any decision to follow this path should be discussed with the  
incoming area directors of the Security area within the Open Grid  
Forum, along with specific details about the charter.  To make this  
happen, we could form a BOF to be held at the next OGF  conference in  
North Carolina in January, along the lines of the recent "Shibboleth  
for Grids" one that we held at GGF 18, with an aim to take on this  
topic as a roadmap activity directly.

Thought are extremely welcome and recruited.  As a point of  
background information, I have been discussing this idea among the  
members of the overall OGSA-WG working group, and have found many  
useful suggestions and an open reception to this idea.  The topic of  
a BOF as discussed above has been strongly encouraged.

Best,
Alan

Alan Sill
TIGRE Senior Scientist
High Performance Computing Center
TTU

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