[jsdl-wg] my view on "user credentials"

[Ali Anjomshoaa]

Many thanks for this Karl. It is very clear. Any other thoughts on this?
Donal, Michel, Darren...?

Thanks in advance,

Ali


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Karl Czajkowski wrote:

> I don't disagree that user credentials will be important for many
> jobs. However, I disagree that a type and semantics-free
> UserCredential field, as in the current draft, actually helps.
> 
> I think a consumer of a JSDL document needs to know two things to make
> use of credentials: 1) what is it, and 2) what is it for.  I think it
> is wishful thinking to say there is one generic user credential
> category and the consumer can divine the rest from the value
> itself. If this is so, we might as well put this expressive value in
> the xsd:any##other slot as an extension (understood by some, but not
> all, consumers).
> 
> For example, in WS-GRAM for GT4, we do not pass around credentials per
> se, but we do pass around references to credentials (the actual
> credentials are moved ahead of time by out-of-band means relative to
> WS-GRAM).  Because each of these references is of the same type (and
> referring to the same type of credential: our GSI proxies), we have
> separate fields in the WS-GRAM job language to designate the purpose
> of each one: one to put in the job's environment (as a file), one for
> WS-GRAM to use when invoking our RFT file transfer service, and a
> third to pass through (by reference) to the RFT service itself (which
> it then uses to authenticate with GridFTP).
> 
> We would have to use these wrappers in the JSDL transliteration, since
> "user credentials" is too abstract to actually convey the different
> meanings we have.  I suspect that any meaningful "pass through" would
> have to do the same thing---designate _which_ target mechanism to pass
> the values to.  It wouldn't help much if a JSDL consumer "passed" a
> Kerberos ticket in the file where we expect GSI proxies, or vice
> versa.
> 
> 
> karl
> 
> -- 
> Karl Czajkowski
> karlcz at univa.com
> 
> 

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