Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemGrid infrastructures for secure access to and use of bioinformatics data: experiences from the BRIDGES project(IEEE Computer Society, 2006)The BRIDGES project was funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to address the needs of cardiovascular research scientists investigating the genetic causes of hypertension as part of the Wellcome Trust funded (£4.34M) cardiovascular functional genomics (CFG) project. Security was at the heart of the BRIDGES project and an advanced data and compute grid infrastructure incorporating latest grid authorisation technologies was developed and delivered to the scientists. We outline these grid infrastructures and describe the perceived security requirements at the project start including data classifications and how these evolved throughout the lifetime of the project. The uptake and adoption of the project results are also presented along with the challenges that must be overcome to support the secure exchange of life science data sets. We also present how we will use the BRIDGES experiences in future projects at the National e-Science Centre.
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ItemAdvanced security infrastructures for grid education( 2006)This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain.
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ItemSecure, reliable and dynamic access to distributed clinical data( 2006)An abundance of statistical and scientific data exists in the area of clinical and epidemiological studies. Much of this data is distributed across regional, national and international boundaries with different policies on access and usage, and a multitude of different schemata for the data often complicated by the variety of supporting clinical coding schemes. This prevents the wide scale collation and analysis of such data as is often needed to infer clinical outcomes and to determine the often moderate effect of drugs. Through grid technologies it is possible to overcome the barriers introduced by distribution of heterogeneous data and services. However reliability, dynamicity and fine-grained security are essential in this domain, and are not typically offered by current grids. The MRC funded VOTES project (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) has implemented a prototype infrastructure specifically designed to meet these challenges. This paper describes this on-going implementation effort and the lessons learned in building grid frameworks for and within a clinical environment.
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ItemDynamic privilege management infrastructures utilising secure attribute exchange(Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, 2005)Technologies which implement dynamic privilege management infrastructures will be crucial to the secure sharing of resources on the Grid, especially as the number of resources and participating sites increases. The DyVOSE project has successfully deployed Grid services secured with the PERMIS authorisation software implementing a static Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) model. The second stage of this project focuses on the extension of the current PERMIS infrastructure to include dynamic delegation of authority and cross-certification of institutional security policies. This paper describes the existing static PMI that has been used within the Grid Computing module as part of the advanced MSc at Glasgow University. We also outline an e-Science education use case that will be used to highlight how dynamic PMIs can be established using an extended version of PERMIS and utilising the Internet2 Shibboleth software to transfer user attributes and authentication tokens across institutional boundaries. This work addresses one of the key challenges in the Grid, supporting the dynamic establishment of secure Virtual Organisations (VOs).
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ItemComparison of advanced authorisation infrastructures for grid computing(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2005)The widespread use of grid technology and distributed compute power, with all its inherent benefits, will only be established if the use of that technology can be guaranteed efficient and secure. The predominant method for currently enforcing security is through the use of public key infrastructures (PKI) to support authentication and the use of access control lists (ACL) to support authorisation. These systems alone do not provide enough fine-grained control over the restriction of user rights, necessary in a dynamic grid environment. This paper compares the implementation and experiences of using the current standard for grid authorisation with Globus - the grid security infrastructure (GSI) - with the role-based access control (RBAC) authorisation infrastructure PERMIS. The suitability of these security infrastructures for integration with regard to existing grid technology is presented based upon experiences within the JISC-funded DyVOSE project.