[ogsa-authn-bof] Soliciting the grid community's views on risk-based authN & authZ schemes

[Mike 'Mike' Jones]

Salutations,

On behalf of the UK JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/), the ES-LoA Project 
(E-infrastructure Security: authentication Levels of Assurance) is soliciting 
views from the community of services, and identity and resource providers about 
the use-of/need-for a risk-based authentication and authorisation scheme.  Such 
a scheme, built on top of open standards based middleware such as Shibboleth, 
would take into account the level of confidence in users' identification 
through their identity and attribute assertions when deciding whether or not to 
permit access to a particular resource.

The principle objectives of the ES-LoA project are as follows:

  o to raise the community's awareness with regard to authentication
    Levels of Assurance (LoA) as one of the factors that can be used to
    quantify the degree of protection for resources with varying levels of
    sensitivity in federated environments,
  o to investigate potential applications of LoA to various types of
    service, including resources provided for the grid/e-Science
    community, and library and e-learning resources,
  o to build community consensus in using the appropriate definition of LoA
    reflecting the trustworthiness of a resource's authentication
    mechanism, and
  o to raise service providers' interests in deploying a technology that
    can help them to achieve LoA linked fine-grained access control.

If you provide, or plan to provide, a service or client infrastructure that 
issues or consumes credentials for authentication we would be grateful if you 
would take time to participate in this survey.  The results will also form 
input to the Open Grid Forum's activity in this area through the LoA research 
group.

The survey, entitled "ES-LoA Survey Questionnaire", is available from 
http://www.es-loa.org/output.  Please either fill in the online form or return 
the completed Word document to es-loa at manchester.ac.uk by Friday 8th June 2007.

Thank you for your time and valuable information,

the ES-LoA project team.