HI Alan I think your charter needs to add something along the following lines so that the demarcation between Authn and Authz is made clear at the outset (then there can be no turf wars in the future, heaven forbid :-). The focus of this WG is authentication. The focus of the WG-Authz group is authorisation. There may be some blurring of this distinction in the actual technologies that are used in deployments, for example, when a security token contains both a public key and attributes and can therefore be used for both authentication and authorisation purposes. Nevertheless, even is such cases, there are clearly separate procedures needed for validating a security token from an authentication perspective and an authorisation perspective. This WG will consider the former only, whilst the OGSA Authz WG will consider the latter only. In all cases the authentication validation procedures precede the authorisation validation procedures, and are a necessary precursor to the latter. regards David Alan Sill wrote:
Discussion among participants and potential participants has indicated a desire to proceed directly to a launch of the OGSA-AuthN working group rather than proceed through a BOF. Most people who would participate or be affected have up to now been involved in related efforts and would be able to come up to speed fairly quickly in this effort.
Here are the elements of a charter, or potential charter, for this group that I have identified:
1) Review existing security profiles resulting from previous efforts of the Security area and security design group from the OGSA-WG effort
a) Compare them to existing technology and best practices in the community and check for consistency of coverage
b) Document authentication profiles that may be missing or incomplete
b) Review mature and maturing technologies likely to affect the above best practices for grid services
2) Provide an AuthN development roadmap to compare with the overall OGSA roadmap
3) Spawn any subgroups and/or suggest associated research groups that may be necessary for consistent development in this area.
The charter can be developed from the above skeleton, and the basics agreed to before the first session at OGF-19 in North Carolina.
It is explicitly a part of the charter for this group to work in a symmetrical manner with any OGSA-AuthZ work that may be needed for consistency in grid services.
Comments welcome.
Alan
Alan Sill TIGRE Senior Scientist High Performance Computing Center TTU
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