I'd like to suggest to the CAOps and Grid CA community that we attempt to pull together thoughts on grid identity authentication in terms of a roadmap and/or BOF among interested parties, focusing primarily on the AuthN side. This would be a complement to the OGSA- AuthZ activity, which we could clearly call OGSA-AuthN. I realize that we need another working group like, well, a whack on the head, but I have thought about this one a lot and I think that the OGSA process would bring a lot of rationalization to the activities and effort that we are pursuing more or less piecemeal in the search for a workable solution. Among things that we could gain by having such an effort, we could include: - Clear separation from OGSA-AuthZ while still allowing a strong channel for communication - Bringing together several different working groups who are all working on identity provision (as opposed to authorization) for grids - Providing for better communication between the OGSA roadmap and CAOps practices - Providing a context for working groups, such as the Bridge CA and Shibboleth activities, to communicate their findings - Placing OGSA-AuthN and OGSA-AuthZ on a similar footing To follow through on this, I would like to have a brief discussion in the IGTF portion of the upcoming EUGridPMA meeting, followed by a similar discussion at the TAGPMA Novemvber face-to-face, and of course encourage similar discussion at the APGridPMA meeting this fall. Any decision to follow this path should be discussed with the incoming area directors of the Security area within the Open Grid Forum, along with specific details about the charter. To make this happen, we could form a BOF to be held at the next OGF conference in North Carolina in January, along the lines of the recent "Shibboleth for Grids" one that we held at GGF 18, with an aim to take on this topic as a roadmap activity directly. Thought are extremely welcome and recruited. As a point of background information, I have been discussing this idea among the members of the overall OGSA-WG working group, and have found many useful suggestions and an open reception to this idea. The topic of a BOF as discussed above has been strongly encouraged. Best, Alan Alan Sill TIGRE Senior Scientist High Performance Computing Center TTU ==================================================================== : Alan Sill, Texas Tech University Office: Admin 233, MS 4-1167 : : e-mail: Alan.Sill@ttu.edu ph. 806-742-4350 fax 806-742-4358 : ====================================================================