CILogon 2.0: An Integrated Identity and Access Management Platform for Science

Dr Jim Basney², Ms Heather Flanagan¹, Mr Terry Fleury², Dr Scott Koranda¹, Dr Jeff Gaynor², Mr Benjamin Oshrin¹

¹Spherical Cow Group, Wauwatosa, United States, hlflanagan@sphericalcowgroup.com, skoranda@sphericalcowgroup.com, benno@sphericalcowgroup.com 

²University of Illinois, Urbana, United States, jbasney@illinois.edu, tfleury@illinois.edu, gaynor@illinois.edu,  

When scientists work together, they use web sites and other software to share their ideas and data. To ensure the integrity of their work, these systems require the scientists to log in and verify that they are part of the team working on a particular science problem.  Too often, the identity and access verification process is a stumbling block for the scientists. Scientific research projects are forced to invest time and effort into developing and supporting Identity and Access Management (IAM) services, distracting them from the core goals of their research collaboration.

CILogon 2.0 provides a software platform that enables scientists to work together to meet their IAM needs more effectively so they can allocate more time and effort to their core mission of scientific research. The platform builds on prior work from the CILogon [1] and COmanage [2] projects to provide an integrated IAM platform for cyberinfrastructure, federated worldwide via InCommon [3] and eduGAIN [4]. CILogon 2.0 serves the unique needs of research collaborations, namely the need to dynamically form collaboration groups across organizations and countries, sharing access to data, instruments, compute clusters, and other resources to enable scientific discovery.

We operate CILogon 2.0 via a software-as-a-service model to ease integration with cyberinfrastructure, while making all software components publicly available under open source licenses to enable reuse. We present the design and implementation of CILogon 2.0, along with operational performance results from our experience supporting over four thousand active users.

REFERENCES

1. Available at: http://www.cilogon.org/, accessed 07 June 2018.
2. Available at: https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/COmanage/Home, accessed 07 June 2018.
3. Available at: https://www.incommon.org/, accessed 07 June 2018.
4. Available at: https://edugain.org/, accessed 07 June 2018.

Biography:

Scott Koranda specializes on identity management architectures that streamline and enhance collaboration for research organizations.  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4478-9026