AIM 08/09 Funded Projects February 5, 2010
Posted by chriscb in : AIM, Projects , trackbackThe following projects were funded from the recent 08/09 call. They all started on 1 January 2010 and some run till the end date of the programme, which is 31 March 2011. Details of all projects funded by the Access and Identity Management Programme can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/aim.aspx. See individual project’s links for more information on the project including contact details.
eCert
| Project Manager | Lisha Chen Wilson |
| Institution | University of Southampton |
| Duration | 12 months |
| Project Summary | This project seeks to address the issue of design for a suitable user-centric “eCertificate” system by working with representatives of the community to establish use case scenarios, and to then verify this design by building a demonstrator, and then testing the demonstrator within the group. The demonstrator will be based on a code library, so that others will be able to build eCertificate applications based on this code library, which will be placed in the public domain. |
GRAND (GRanularity, Audit, N-tier, and Delegation)
| Project Manager | Caleb Racey |
| Institution | Newcastle University |
| Duration | 15 months |
| Project Summary | The GRAND project will investigate approaches to address the areas of “Granularity and delegation”, “Audit and Accounting” and “N-tier authentication”. It will exploit the existing mature access management systems deployed in Newcastle University to investigate use cases, policy and procedure implications and the technical tools necessary to address these concerns. The project aims to make advanced cutting edge approaches to these areas a practical widely deployed reality. |
Identity & Access Management using Social Networking Technologies
| Project Manager | Mike Jones |
| Institution | University of Manchester |
| Duration | 9 months |
| Project Summary | This project applies social networking technologies implemented via the Semantic Web to support identity management. Developing software that benefits from using social trust models for authorisation and authentication. The technology will be based on Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF), which is a vocabulary used to provide information about people and organisations and to describe relationships between them.The resultant technology will support more flexible, transient, ad hoc relationships between people, such as those formed for the purpose of a specific project (i.e. virtual organisations) and can include individuals who would otherwise fit with difficulty in the hierarchy of institutions such as foreign guest researchers or external consultants. The technology will be applied to core middleware utilised by two important JISC initiatives which rely heavily on the Access and Identity Management programme: the UK NGS and the UK Access Management Federation. |
Logins for Life
| Project Manager | John Sotillo |
| Institution | University of Kent |
| Duration | 15 months |
| Project Summary | The Logins for Life project addresses the needs of a University to engage with users throughout their lives. It will create use cases, policies and recommendations for dealing with user accounts throughout their changing roles while catering for existing digital identities. It will also create a test environment which will demonstrate how these policies can be delivered using open source tools. |
A Proxy Credential Auditing Infrastructure for the UK e-Science National Grid Service
| Project Manager | Wei Jie |
| Institution | Thames Valley University |
| Duration | 15 months |
| Project Summary | Proxy certificates, used for authentication-oriented access and usage of resources, can potentially be obtained and abused by a malicious third party without the knowledge of the holder. This project will build upon initial prototypes and demonstrate a solution that enables a thorough auditing of proxy credential usage in widely distributed and heterogeneous research environments exemplified by the NGS. In undertaking this, a secure service will be developed through which auditing information can be tracked and used for user-level monitoring, virtual organization (VO)-level usage and monitoring, and resource provider-level usage and monitoring. In close collaboration with the NGS this auditing service will be made available to the NGS for longer term auditing and monitoring purposes of its customer and research base. The auditing service will be demonstrated in an international setting including use of the NGS, ScotGrid (www.scotgrid.ac.uk), TeraGrid in the US (www.teragrid.org) and the D-Grid in Germany (www.d-grid.de/). |
Retrieval, Analysis, and Presentation Toolkit for usage of Online Resources (RAPTOR)
| Project Manager | Graham Mason |
| Institution | Cardiff University |
| Duration | 15 months |
| Project Summary | This project will build a software toolkit for reporting e-resource usage statistics in a user-friendly manner suitable for non-technical staff. This will allow an institution to understand which resources they need to keep subscribing to, and those which they may wish to unsubscribe from – potentially resulting in real-world cost savings. It will achieve this through a requirements gathering exercise, talking to staff within the project institutions, a group of pilot institutions, interested parties, and via an open call for ideas. At the very least the software toolkit will consume Shibboleth Identity Provider log files, and may also be extended to consume log files from other e-resource access methods such as EZProxy. |
Student-Managed Access to Online Resources (SMART)
| Project Manager | Maciej Machulak |
| Institution | Newcastle University |
| Duration | 15 months |
| Project Summary | The SMART (Student-Managed Access to Online Resources) project will develop an online data access management system based on the ProtectServe protocol (this is in the process of being standardised by the User-Managed Access work group (charter of the Kantara Initiative)), a newly proposed technology that expands OAuth. The project will define a HE case study that exemplifies access management requirements for HE applications, implement a ProtectServe based access management solution and evaluate this through a user study. The project builds on existing research by the investigators and is carried out in collaboration with the university’s ISS IT organisation. Through this work, they ensure that HE requirements for access management are taken into consideration early in the standardisation process, and, at the same time, ensure that UK HE continues to be at the forefront of developments in this area. |
SOFA (Service-Oriented Federated Authorization)
| Project Manager | Andrew Simpson |
| Institution | University of Oxford |
| Duration | 12 months |
| Project Summary | This project will focus on meeting the interoperability challenges associated with authorization at an organisational level. Even in contexts where standardisation is achieved, there will still be outliers or legacy systems dependent upon locally determined approaches to security. We will leverage experience in developing tools and technologies to link heterogeneous data sources to develop a system that allows institutions not only to link such data sources securely, but also to link such sources without a need for reliance on a single authorization mechanism. While acknowledging that standardisation has much to offer, this system offers a pragmatic approach that is capable of facilitating a secure ‘bridge’ between new and legacy, and central and outlying, systems. |
Web Services Tiered Internet Authorisation (WSTIERIA)
| Project Manager | Fiona Culloch |
| Institution | EDINA National Data Centre |
| Duration | 12 months |
| Project Summary | State of the art in authentication for REST-style web services is still IP-address checking; federated access is problematic due to its dependence on a user at a web browser. This project will enable interoperation of web services with the UK federation by taking two current developments; by Internet2 in extending Shibboleth to handle an n-tier/portal use case, and by EDINA in developing non-browser access to federated web services, and applying them to one or more real use cases. |
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