Grid Meter » Open Source Identity Management and the Grid

March 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Identity Management and the Grid

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For all the vendor hype around single sign-on and federated identity, enterprises still tend to face significant administrative challenges when they try to interoperate with various other identity systems (such as NIS, OpenID, SXIP, etc.).

IBM and Novell's joint announcement earlier this month about their efforts around the Higgins Trust Framework -- an identity meta system built on open standards and open source -- was exciting to the Grid community, whose security challenges tend to be even more identity-specific than the average enterprise's.

"The biggest challenge in Grid security is how to cross administrative domains in a well understood way," said Frank Siebenlist, Senior Software Architect with the Globus Alliance.

Open identity efforts such as the Higgins Trust framework are interesting to Grid developers, because they present the possibility of abstracting multiple identity systems behind a single, open interface that can more easily be written to.

"We're looking at open source as a foundation so that a community of developers can work with user-centric identity, and no one gets locked into a proprietary system," said Nataraj Nagaratnam, Chief Architect for Identity Management at IBM.

The great promise of Grid in resource virtualization presents some unique challenges. Not so much in the technology itself, but in the wide scope of implementations that the technology is applied to. While issues of security have always presented potential stumbling blocks for Grid, it has also been an area where "the right people" have been in place to overcome such obstacles. In fact, it seems as though we only hear about these Grid security challenges because they have been solved.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on March 13, 2006 08:48 AM

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