[ogsa-d-wg] Security issues for data services

[William E. Allcock]

Dave,

Thunderbird didn't seem to like your HTML mail, it wouldnt wrap the HTML 
and so the lines were veeerrrryyyyy long.  Anyway, a couple of comments:

I disagree that replication services need to enforce common security 
levels for replicas.  If I have read access to a file, I can copy it and 
set its access to whatever I want.  If that is important data, it is 
assumed that since I have read access I will take care of it.  A 
community may wish to impose consistent access rights across replicas, 
but that is a policy issue not something inherent in replication services.

As to the federated security model, I again dont think that is 
necessary, if I access n different sites, I have to do n authentication 
and authorization checks and if any one of them fails the access fails. 
  This does imply some things about uniform identity, they all trust the 
same CAs, even that they are all using the same security mechanism.  It 
would also be a major pain to debug access problems, particularly if the 
system is dynamically choosing the resource so you dont even know where 
are accessing things.  I suppose it might be possible to query your 
rights across all the resources and present a federated access rights 
list that was the least common denominator.

The idea of users not wanting anyone, including admins knowing what they 
have stored is a security concern.  How do we know that they are not 
storing stolen top secret information or that they are actually running 
bomb design software.  I dont subscribe to this, but I have heard this 
argument from security folks before.

Bill

-- 
William E. Allcock
Argonne National Laboratory
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