Federated Access Management for Collaborative Network Environments: Framework and Case Study

With the advent of various collaborative sharing mechanisms such as Grids, P2P and Clouds, organizations including private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of being involved in inter-organizational, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative projects that may require diverse resources to be shared among participants. In particular, an environment that often makes use of a group of high-performance network facilities would involve large-scale collaborative projects and tremendously seek a robust and flexible access control for allowing collaborators to leverage and consume resources, e.g., computing power and bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a federated access management scheme that leverages the notion of attributes. Our approach allows resource-sharing organizations to provide distributed provisioning (publication, location, communication, and evaluation) of both attributes and policies for federated access management purposes. Also, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation that leverages distributed hash tables (DHT) to traverse chains of attributes and effectively handle the federated access management requirements devised for inter-organizational resource sharing and collaborations.