MAMS Virtual Organization Toolkit: IAM Suite

The MAMS project has started working on an eResearch toolkit this year, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Suite, which allows users to quickly setup an eResearch project infrastructure supporting easy collaboration. Features include:

• Login via Shibboleth and your institution's IdP^?
• Automatically retrieve a proxy certificate from the federation's MyProxy^? server: this certificate can be used to access Grid services
• Manage groups and workspaces
• Add your own JSR168 compliant portlets
• Contains Grid portlets (if required)
• Access other applications, like Wikis, CMS, LMS, etc. where your attributes are passed via the VO.
• Simple Role-Based Access Control to those other applications by setting user entitlements in the VO.

The basic architecture is very simple: each VO would be a trusted Service Provider in the Federation, thereby being able to receive SAML assertions from IdPs^?. Internally, it would have its own attribute authority (VO-AA), which also uses the Shibboleth IdP^?, to release assertions to external applications, and its own VO-WAYF, allowing it to select (trust) IdPs^? from multiple federations. In addition, it can release RBAC entitlements as well, allowing the application to automatically authorize the person.

On Tuesday 28 November, Rhys Francis organized a NCRIS eResearch Toolkit meeting: during this meeting, we discussed a possible infrastructure which I have depicted below. Basically, the VO acts as the AAA glue between National Data Centres and Computing centres. The VO itself also contains some useful tools to support domain-independent activities (collaborations, real-time communications, event/calendaring, Wiki, CMS, etc). Domain dependent activities, like accessing a Surface Electron Microscope or Cyclotron, could be integrated as portlets or these research-specific tools could be linked as external web applications. However, it seems unlikely that NCRIS 5.16 will fund work on those.

I've also added two Flash demos below to show you how it works:

• Demonstrates how a VO might be created and managed

• Example of how the VO toolkit could be used for the RQF (Research Quality Framework)

As a final note, we are also currently investigating myVocs further, which is a based on a similar idea:

-- ErikVullings - 04 Dec 2006

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