[CAnet - news] New Trust Federation for international science collaboration

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Trust on the Grid Goes Global

Boston, Mass., USA - 
Today (5 October, 2005), users of Grid computing worldwide are a step closer
to accessing computers and information in 50 countries and regions , from
Canada to China, Portugal to Pakistan. The International Grid Trust
Federation (IGTF), established this week during the 15th Global Grid Forum
(GGF) in Boston, brings together Grid organizations representing Asia, the
Americas and Europe that are working towards allowing scientific researchers
to identify themselves to any Grid resource in the world with just a single
online identity. 

IGTF's members issue electronic certificates that allow scientists to use
the Grid. The Grids protected by IGTF certificates include over 40,000
computer processors and petabytes of storage - equivalent to over a million
DVDs. Making sure the owners of Grids trust each other's security procedures
is key to letting researchers access all these resources.

"Living in the information age, access to electronic resources has never
been so vital before.", says Christos Kanellopoulos of Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki, Greece, and co-chair of the GGF Certification Authorities
Operations working group (CAOPS): "Already today e-scientists can use their
certificates to access and use grid enabled resources in any part of the
world, making the World Wide Grid a reality. IGTF is a big step towards the
dream of bridging the digital divide".

The IGTF brings grid-oriented organizations around the globe much closer to
realizing the promise of grids. Grids aim to harness the power of
geographically dispersed computing resources, experimental facilities and
research centres. Grid developers' goal is to provide seamless access to all
the resources available. However, at present there are many independently
operated grids, spread throughout the world, and users able to work on one
can't necessarily gain access to the others.

Fundamental to user access is user authentication - making sure that only
those users who have the proper credentials are granted access to the
resources. While this can be a significant challenge within a grid,
achieving agreement on how to provide this level of authentication between
grids has been an even bigger challenge. That's where the IGTF takes centre
stage. With the establishing of the IGTF, the foundation is laid for
building a trusted basis for identity management, and a further step taken
towards global interoperability for scientific grids.

The IGTF is a federation of certification authorities or grid policy
management authorities (grid PMAs), and the major grid infrastructure
projects that together define the policies and standards for grid identity
management. Comprising the three regional grid policy management bodies, the
Asia Pacific Grid PMA (APGridPMA), the European Policy Management Authority
for Grid Authentication in e-Science (EUGridPMA) and the Americas GridPMA
(TAGPMA), the federation today has 61 members and covers 50 countries and
regions. 

The new federation builds on the strong foundations laid in Europe by the
EUGridPMA, which established the common baseline for identity providers that
is considered trustworthy by an increasing number of resource centres and
service providers. These same guidelines were also adopted by the APGridPMA
and the TAGPMA, who at the same time enriched the federation with innovative
services for quickly bootstrapping new centres in the Grid, and integration
of the Grid with the scientists' home organisations. 

The three EU e-Infrastructure projects Enabling Grids for e-Science (EGEE),
the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications
(DEISA), and the South-Eastern European Grid-enabled e-Infrastructure
Development (SEE-GRID), as well as the Nordic European Grid (NorduGrid),
were the first to join the common trust domain, and the strong support from
the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group at the European policy level further
accelerated the building of the federation.

Also the US-based Open Science Grid (OSG) and TERAGrid projects, the ApGrid
and PRAGMA projects in the Asia Pacific, and the world-wide LHC Computing
Grid (LCG), base their authentication on the certificates issued by the IGTF
affiliated certification authorities. Regional and national programmes that
collaborate on a global scale also leverage the IGTF foundations today.

Canadian researchers who are part of regional efforts such as Westgrid and
national projects such as Gridx1 will benefit from this trust federation by
allowing them to collaborate internationally.

"Recently, the number of organizations involved in large scale regional and
international Grid projects in the Asia Pacific region has been dramatically
increasing," said Yoshio Tanaka (AIST, Tokyo, Japan), chair of the Asia
Pacific Grid PMA. "There is a strong demand for establishing trust
federation with production Grid projects in Europe and Americas. The IGTF
accelerates the emergence of a globe-wide Grid infrastructure". 

Leveraging both national and international support from a variety of
sources, the members of the federation are able to provide high-quality
credentials - called certificates - at no cost to the scientists. Key
members of federation, like The DoEGrids Certificate Authority operated by
the U.S. Department of Energy's ESnet, and the Grid-FR CA operated by the
French national research council CNRS, ensure that no scientists are "left
out in the rain", and act as a catch-all for communities like the LCG and
EGEE projects with a global network of agents. 

Tony Genovese from DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which
manages ESnet for DOE, says: "By establishing IGTF, we are seeing the
fruition of a the first steps ESnet and the European Grid took back in
February 2002 when a researcher at Fermilab used an authenticating
certificate created by ESnet to successfully transfer files to Imperial
College and Lancaster University in the U.K. We did this as part of the
pilot for the Particle Physics Data Grid. Once the British sites and
Fermilab recognized and accepted each other's certificates, the data
transfer went smoothly".

The IGTF is closely linked to the efforts of the CA Operations Working Group
in the Global Grid Forum, whose co-chair Darcy Quesnel of CANARIE is also
the chair of the Americas Grid PMA. The working group provides the standard
federation documents and the broad consensus between providers and relying
parties. 

The other important element for enabling a wide trust base is the use of the
TACAR repository run by TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Educational
Networking Association: a single source for all relying parties to validate
their trust infrastructure both for the IGTF and for many other academic
identity providers.

The future work of the IGTF will venture into better integration of Grid
authentication with other mechanisms. "The future is going to be with
integrated services. Currently grid identity management is usually a
separate thing the user needs to think about," said David Groep of NIKHEF
(Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and chair of the EUGridPMA. "In the future,
single sign-on should integrate grid, network and campus resources in a
seamless system. Grid computing in a university classroom is currently hard
to do; new services that will emerge based on the IGTF work will alleviate
this barrier".



For more information regarding the IGTF in general, please contact 
1.	Tony Genovese electronically at [email protected] or 
by phone at +1 510 486 4003 (available working hours US Pacific time),
2.	Darcy Quesnel electronically at [email protected] or
by phone at +1 613 996-2144 (available working hours Canadian Eastern time),
3.	David L. Groep electronically at: [email protected] (available
working hours Central European Time), 
4.	Yoshio Tanaka electronically at: [email protected] (available
working hours Japanese Standard Time)


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These news items and comments are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect
those  of the CANARIE board or management.


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