Report of OGF22 Meeting, Boston, 25-28 Feb 2008
Author. David Chadwick, University of Kent
OGSA-Authz Working Group
The author chaired the working group session, which proved to be very productive. The
group agreed an aggressive schedule for producing its final deliverables (protocol
profiles) for public comment, and closing down the WG at the Barcelona meeting (OGF
23) or at the latest the one after that. The minutes of the meeting have been posted at:
https://forge.gridforum.org/sf/go/doc15093
so there is little point in repeating them here. The major contentious issue was what to do
about standardising the attributes and obligations that are passed in the current protocol
profiles, if the current WG is to close down. After a long discussion an impasse was
reached, so it is likely that nothing will happen in the short term, until enough people get
together and push for either a new WG or an update to the current Authz charter. Either
way, it is felt that this will be a long term effort as it will be based on the requirements of
actual user groups who are actively utilising the profiles that have already been specified.
Demonstration of OGSA-Authz Interworking
Several members of the Authz group demonstrated interworking between different
products based on the OGSA-Authz specifications. These were GT4, PERMIS, VOMS,
GP-BOX, and Sun’s XACML PDP. This shows that the profile standards produced by
the OGSA Authz working group are now maturing and are ready for wide scale adoption.
Security Area Group Meeting
This meeting highlighted the security work that was being planned during the week, as
well as summarising the output of the OGSA Authz meeting that had met earlier that day.
It is clear that overall the amount of effort that is available to push security
standards/research topics forward at the OGF is less than the number of topics that could
be explored. This is a pity, since the OGF has done some good work in helping to ensure
interworking between different security component providers, but in some respects it has
been technology push as the application developers have either not seen the need for the
advanced security tools that have been made available or have made do with simple quick
fix and/or home grown solutions.
Other meetings
There were various other general interest meetings during the week, such as the Town
Hall Meeting to discuss future directions of the OGF, an invited talk on Cloud
Computing and the Plenary by Charlie Catlett.
As always a valuable part of attending the OGF is the ability to network with other
researchers who it would otherwise be more difficult to meet.