ShibGrid: Shibboleth Access for the UK National Grid Service

David Spence, Neil Geddes, Jens Jensen, Andrew Richards, Matthew Viljoen, Andrew P. Martin, Matthew J. Dovey, Mark Norman, Kang Tang, Anne E. Trefethen, David Wallom, Rob Allan, David Meredith

Abstract: This paper presents work undertaken to integrate the future UK national Shibboleth infrastructure with the UK's National Grid Service (NGS). Our work, ShibGrid, provides both transparent authentication for portal based Grid access and a credential transformation service for users of other Grid access methods. The ShibGrid support for portal-based transparent Grid authentication is provided as a set of standards-based drop-in modules which can be used with any project portal as well as the NGS project in which they are initially deployed. The ShibGrid architecture requires no changes to the UK national Shibboleth authentication infrastructure or the NGS security infrastructure and provides access for users both with and without UK e-Science certificates. In addition to presenting both the architecture of Shib- Grid and its implementation, we additionally place the ShibGrid project within the context of other efforts to integrate Shibboleth with Grids.