Current Activities in Middleware Ken Klingenstein, Project Director, Internet2 Middleware Initiative Chief Technologist, University of Colorado at Boulder

Topics Application requirements - Digital libraries, Grids, IMS, Portals, etc... Early Harvest best practices Early Adopters Mace (Middleware Architectural Committee for Education) Experiments: Shibboleth, the Directory of Directories, and Eduperson PKI Medical middleware International Efforts

Application Requirements Digital libraries need scalable, interoperable authentication and authorization. The Grid as the new paradigm for a computational resource, with Globus the middleware, including security, location and allocation of resources, scheduling, etc. built on top of campus infrastructures. Instructional Management Systems (IMS) need authentication and directories Next-generation portals want common authentication and storage

Partnerships EDUCAUSE CREN Globus, Legion, etc. Campuses Professional associations - AACRAO, NACUA, CUMREC

The Early Harvest experiences Identifiers for people, objects, groups Authentication for people, objects and groups Directories to store common information Authorization services Applications that use all of the above Complex design and implementation tradeoffs at technical and policy levels

Early Harvest Outputs Identifier mapping Good practice documents on middleware web site, to guide campus IT organizations Informational RFC in June May form part of the basis for an assurance model for higher ed PKI

Identifier Mapping Map campus identifiers against a canonical set of functional needs For each identifier, establish its key characteristics, including revocation, reassignment, privileges, and opacity Shine a light on some of the shadowy underpinnings of middleware

Major campus identifiers UUID Student and/or emplid Person registry id Account login id Enterprise-lan id Netid address Library/deptl id Publicly visible id (and pseudossn) Pseudonymous id

Identifier Characteristics Revocation - can the subject ever be given a different value for the identifier Reassignment - can the identifier ever be given to another subject Privileges - what accesses does the authenticated identifier have Opacity - is the real world subject easily deduced from the identifier - privacy and use issues

Identifier relationships Person registry ID address Library ID Acct login Pseudo ID Student ID PubVis ID Enterprise-LAN ID Departmental IDs UUID Empl ID ISO card ID

Authentication Options Password based Clear text LDAP Kerberos Certificate based Others - challenge-response, biometrics

Typical Good Practices Have a UUID that is non-revocable, non-reassignable, opaque No clear text passwords Precrack new passwords, using foreign dictionaries as well as US Confirm new passwords are different than old Require password change if possibly compromised Use shared secrets or positive photo-id to reset forgotten passwords Password strength depends on use...

Typical Interoperability Standards dc= instead of X.500 for naming of directory suffixes, certificate subjects, etc. use of certain object class future standardization of certificate profiles

Directories: Core of the Core Overall campus directory services model Enterprise directory design and implementation Departmental directories Security and directories

Enterprise directory issues Schema, referrals and redundancy Naming Attributes Replication and synchronization Groups

Early Adopters: The Campus Testbed Phase A variety of roles and missions Commitment to move implementation forward Provided some training and facilitated support Develop national models of deployment alternatives Address policy standards

Early Adopter Participants Dartmouth U Hawaii Johns Hopkins Univ of Maryland, BC Univ of Memphis Univ of Michigan Michigan Tech Univ Univ of Pittsburgh Univ of Southern Cal Tufts Univ Univ of Tennessee, Memphis

Primary Goals to facilitate the campus deployments of core middleware technologies to identify reasonable approaches - both technical and policy - and design issues and factors that influence institutional selection of a particular approach to enrich the technical contents of Early Harvest to inform larger community (NSF, Education, NIH, etc) of requirements for deployment and interoperability

Secondary Goals explore medical middleware issues Generic - how is this expressed in the core deployment Specific - what medical data structures need integration into campus environment outreach to encourage other institutions research into options for authorization services evaluate new tools and technologies

Basic Approaches technology sharing and workshops policy sharing champions data owners professional associations - EDUCAUSE, CNI, NACUA, NACUBO, AACRAO, ALA, external experts vendor interactions

MACE (Middleware Architecture Committee for Education) Purpose - to provide advice, create experiments, foster standards, etc. on key technical issues for core middleware within higher ed Membership - Bob Morgan (UW) Chair, Steven Carmody (Brown), Michael Gettes (Georgetown), Keith Hazelton (Wisconsin), Paul Hill (MIT), Mark Mara (Cornell), Mark Poepping (CMU) Current working Groups DIR - eduperson, the Uber-directory experiment PKI - campus operational issues, trust models, fPKI involvement Shibboleth - inter-institutional resource sharing

A Directory of Directories an experiment, now encompassing 8 schools, to build a combined directory search service to show the power of coordination to show the existing barriers to cooperation standard object classes standard display formats standard meta-data to investigate load and scaling issues - on the clients and the servers to suggest the service to follow

Edu-person An objectclass for higher education Contain suggested attributes for instructional, research and administrative inter-institutional use Presumes campuses to add local person objectclass. A joint effort of EDUCAUSE and I2

edu-person 0.9a parent objectclass=inetorgperson intends to integrate with Grid, IMS, and other upper-middleware includes: primary affiliation (fac/stu/staff) enrolledcurrentterm (binary true/false) withdrawnpreviousterm (binary) schoolcollegename, (multivalued case ignore strings)

Shibboleth interinstitutional web authentication and perhaps authorization use local credentials for remote services; enable logins; fosters best practices; encourage transition from simple ht controls to LDAP-based uses SRV records in DNS and several forms of authn; authz via directories IBM to analyze, several schools to participate in pilot

Medical middleware the intersection of higher ed and health care services worst case requirements in I/A HIPAA - new privacy and security requirements must integrate with higher level objects - CORBA Med work will consist of problem structuring, technologies, and policy/process issues

International Aspects identifier agreements international trust models shared expertise workshop this summer in Europe

Authorization how an individual’s attributes are carried from an individual or a central store to an application move from a per-application basis to an infrastructural service options include Kerberos tickets LDAP calls RPC’s long-term certificates attribute certificates

PKI Public Key Certificates are a remarkably simple and powerful tool for signing documents authentication encrypting building secure channels across the Internet non-repudiation conveying authorizations and more Infrastructure to support this little understood mobility user interface internal formats trust chains revocation policy expression See Current Issues in PKI on middleware.internet2.edu for details

Where to watch cren.org fPKI work Globus.org