Dear EUGridPMA and IGTF members,
The 42nd EUGridPMA meeting is now over, and I would like to take this
opportunity to thank again Jana and Jan - and the excellent staff at
CESNET for hosting us in (again a snow-free) Prague and keeping us rolling.
I would like to share with you a few of the highlights of the meeting. Send
corrections and omissions if you spot them, since these have been taken
from my own scribbles and memory at
https://eugridpma.org/meetings/2018-01/eugridpma42-notes-davidg.pdf
Slides with background of the meeting are attached to the agenda at
http://www.eugridpma.org/agenda/42
More extensive notes, kindly taken by David Kelsey, are available
on the web site as well. There's also the audio-recording (a novum) of the
OIDCFed session, but that recording misses the first 15 minutes (and thus
the introduction).
Specific thanks goes to the AARC project and participants, who have
contributed their effort and ideas to the OIDC federation use case
analysis, and whose joint session for Policy Harmonisation (Policy
Development Kit, Training, and the AUP analysis) formed a great
contribution to the IGTF schedule.
Subsequent meetings will be:
** 43rd EUGridPMA meeting, May 23-25 2018, Karlsruhe DE, kindly hosted by
Ingrid and Melanie at the KIT North Campus and the Steinbuch Centre for
Computing
--- Note this meeting will start after lunch on *Wednesday*
** and we're looking for a host for the 44th meeting in September 2018,
for which proposals are very welcome (thanks for considering it)
and of course our affiliated meetings:
* FIM4R and TIIME, Vienna 5 - 8 Feb 2018
* WISE, Abingdon 26 - 28 Feb
* APGridPMA, Taipei 19 March
* ISGC, Taipei 20 - 23 March
* AARC AHM, Athens 10 - 12 April
* EOSC-HUB kick-off, Malaga 16 - 20 April
* I2 GS & REFEDS, San Diego 6 - 9 May
* TNC18 & REFEDS, Trondheim 10-14 June
* PEARC18, Pittsburg 22-27 July
* I2 TechEx & REFEDS, Orlando 14-18 Oct
See all of you in Karlsruhe, or at any of the upcoming meeting of the IGTF
or elsewhere!
Best regards,
DavidG.
Subject discussed and listed below
----------------------------------
* OIDC Federation at the IGTF for Research and e-Infrastructures
* Community Engagement
* Snctfi development and the Policy Development Kit for AARC
* AUP comparison and alignment study
* Assurance Profiles and Vectors
* Assurance Assessment Matrix
* Sharing of code and ideas
* PMA operational matters, reviews, new Grid-FR, RCauth.eu governance
* Other updates: IANA RFC6711 LoA registry entries, Grid Community Forum
* Attendance
All presentations are available on the agenda page:
http://www.eugridpma.org/agenda/42
please review these as well as a complement to this brief summary. Much
information is contained therein and not repeated here.
OIDC Federation at the IGTF for Research and e-Infrastructures
--------------------------------------------------------------
OpenID Connect (OIDC) is gaining a lot of momentum in the Research
Infrastructure (RI) and generic e-Infrastructure (EI) space, where it
is recognised as the most simple way for services to use third-party
identity sources. Addressing both web and non-web use cases (through
complementary technologies like OAuth2), it is underpinning several
well-known services in the community.
The IGTF has as its traditional aim and scope to "establish common
policies and guidelines that enable interoperable, global trust relations
between providers of e-Infrastructures and cyber-infrastructures, identity
providers", and as such we discussed the logical inclusion of
any federation technologies that would help the community. This is not
the general use case including many identity sources (OIDC Providers, or
"OPs") and services that R&E globally needs to solve, but is by
nature more limited to RIs and EIs, where "identity proxies" (see
for more) result in a limited
set of OPs, and where services (RPs) are usually grouped by the
infrastructures. So we expect O(100) entities in the system that would
be in scope for IGTF, not thousands of OP and RP organisations that
constitute the general R&E use case (and is the remit of the eduGAIN
OIDC working groups, REFEDS, and the GN*-* projects).
The IGTF established a working group on OIDC Federation (see
for ToR and background), and
during the I2TechEx ACAMP the objectives were clarified. In this
session, we looked at the scope of the requirements and the use cases
from both RIs and EIs and how OIDCFed, coordinated by the IGTF, would
help solve concrete issues now and in the near future.
Some complex federation elements are already taken care of in OIDC
by the standards: discovery and several methods of metadata-exchange
and client registration. But: some client registration methods convey
a technical connection only, but not trust. And manual client
registration, while it can be made trustworthy, does not scale beyond
a few entities. Making that trust link is the most important bit
now, and for that the IGTF can leverage its existing policy sets:
the authentication profiles, and Snctfi (to bind RPs together).
More documents could be needed - and part of the exercise is also to
find out if our current policy doc suite is comprehensive.
The reason RPs now need to comply to policies is that - in contrast
to the PKIX model - the relationship is direct between OP and RP. With
user-held (certificate) credentials, it was always the user that were
to present the credential to a relying party, and who would take
'responsibility' for releasing (signed) data to such an RP. In the OIDC
case however, there is direct exchange of meta-data between OP and RP, and
the OP must know to which RP (scope) the claims will be released. Even
though the claims data may technically flow also through the user,
the RP-OP relationship is direct and must be technically supported by
trust. That's why in this case requirements (Snctfi, SCI) should be
imposed also on the RPs.
In this session we invited our key stakeholders to share requirements
and context: AARC, GN*, EXILIR and the LSAAI, EGI and EOSC-HUB AAI,
CILogon and XSEDE, and the OIDC-Agent/WaTTS use cases.
We are grateful to everyone for joining the session and sharing ideas!
The following notes must be read in the context of the presentations
linked from the agenda page
* Davide Vaghetti (GARR, for AARC and GN*-*)
The OIDC Federation spec (by Roland Hedberg et al., see
https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-federation-1_0.html) provides
the framework to distributed integrity-protected meta-data. The
challenge now is how to sign (create) the chain of signing keys in
an effective and responsive way. Ideas in GN* evolve around an
on-line signing service where participating orgs can request
(real-time) signing of meta-data - although that would necessitate
client authentication to that service
[the alternative discussed at ACAMP is to merely require a trigger to
the signing service, which can then retrieve the orgs meta-data from
a trusted URI source. This requires of course basic trust in https, but
allows more flexibility (and there are standard tools to protect
such transfers - JimB referred to this model as well. The standard
allows a URI reference in all places where in-line meta-data is
given - so is fine with such an approach]
There can also be many parallel federations. The standard itself does
not impose any particular model or hierarchy. In the SAML world there
is (now) such a de-facto single source (eduGAIN and its signing key),
although that does not address groupings such as entity categories.
Licia reminded us of the fact that the many parallel and meshed
federations from the early days actually resulted in the realisation that
a central thing like eduGAIN was needed (and that took time!).
Yet for OIDCFed the 'federation' can also be seen as an analogy to
the entity categories (Sirtfi, R&S, DPCoCo) - and there also a central
eduGAIN is of no real help today and dedicated campaign needed ...
So the problem is inherently complex, and the structure does not much
help (nor complicate) it.
It should be noted that organisations (and Federation Operators) can be
nested but also 'stopped' and re-rooted at any level. In that sense,
OIDC federations are a lot closed to the Communities of Interest that
were pioneered by Moonshot.
The general model proposed here by Davide needs 'scalability tests':
does it actually work at the intended size of the community. Some
of that related to policies and assessment (trust is more than
enforcement of technicalities!), but also the intended model of
change management (maintenance of meta-data). If the target is to
change keys every 15 minutes, this puts HA requirements on the
signing service, puts at more risk continuity of service (we know
some federations at times fail to update their signatures ;), and
pushes down these requirements also on the RPs. So a balance needs
to be found in real-life tests. Maybe once a day is enough, but
much longer and you would need revocation. There is no free lunch
(apart from those offered by CESNET).
Relying on resilient information (such as https URLs) can make it
easier to scale.
* Michal Prochazka (MUNI, for ELIXIR and LSAAI)
Although at the moment there are just a few clients that talk to
the ELIXIR AAI (or the LS AAI), this is expected to grow as the
AAI services extends beyond just ELIXIR and into other RIs (BBMRI,
Instruct, &c&c). Also many of the cloud service providers will be
using OIDc, and there is the potential that dynamically created
cloud instances of services will all be OIDC clients - the current
manual registration of clients (and issuing clientID and client secrets
to all) will then definitely break down.
Actually, since the LSAAI will underpin soon a full production RI suite,
this is 'urgent' (few months time scale), although minor changes
can be done later of course.
The IGTF level of trust based on the organisational validation and
compliance to at least Snctfi will be sufficient to be useful. It
is not expected that the IGTF would assert suitability for specific
client purposes ("this client RP can be used for human data" is not
expected as a statement from the IGTF :). Such details will be
added by the RI on top of other trust data.
* Jim Basney (NCSA, for CILogon and SciTokens)
For the use cases that CILogon sees (including XSEDE), the need
is for a set of policies and practices that would support a 'trust
anchor distribution'-like service, analogous to what there is today
for PKIX, but then targeting OIDC OPs and RPs.
There are a couple of unique features in OIDC that would make it
better suited for the research use cases, such as the addition of
an explicit scope to the OAuth2 tokens.
This is also the distinguishing factor between CILogon (authN) and
the SciTokens project (AuthZ).
In principle, XSEDE is interested in RPs that are 'in the community'
and a way to recognise those, i.e., the 'R&S' RPs. For those,
dynamic client registration is especially important in the federation
context.
The 'tags' like R&S (and CoCo, Sirtfi) could translate into (overlapping)
federations - so we may end up with a set of IGTF federations, just
like we have a set of Assurance Profiles today (ASPEN, BIRCH, &c)
The standard then allows to 'mesh' federations also at each end
point, so that a relying party (or consortium such as an EI or RI)
can designate of a set of trusted sources and "concatenate" them
themselves.
Thus, a single root is NOT needed for federation, as long as the
(group of) relying parties has a bit of clue on configuration: it
can then flatten it my itself.
Adding tags to the JSON meta-data statements is possible but more complex.
Traditionally, the IGTF has devolved decisions to the relying parties
For any kind of distribution (or signing service), it should be
kept in mind that also today our major relying parties (EIs) actually
re-bundle the IGTF distribution based in their own risk assessments,
and add (and might remove) specific trust anchors at will.
'who owns the policy set in a federation'??
Yet it should be noted that choice results in complexity, and
especially in the general use case choice should likely be avoided.
And for the RIs and EIs: even there sites look towards the central
(EGI, PRACE, WLCG, ...) policy groups to give definitive guidance.
For the IGTF use case however, there will be O(100) organisations,
so it will be easier to manage.
Expected number of OPs < 100, expected number of RP orgs O(100), but
potentially thousands or millions of RP clients (microservices,
cloud dynamic services, instances, &c).
* Nicolas Liampotis (GRNET, for EOSC-HUB AAI, EGI and B2ACCESS)
The goal for EGI and EUDAT in EOSC-HUB is a scalable and trusted form
of OIDC usage. Today there are still less than O(50) clients, but
already next year that might be O(100-1000), and cloud-based services
(containers, microservices) could push that to millions.
The current client registration is heavyweight, as it depends on
manual assessment and bilateral trust (via mail as well). And it
does not address the maintenance of registration data (end of life,
revocation).
EOSC will also have a need for monitoring
- the OIDC end-points are public and could be tested automatically
but then you need a testing credential!
Today in EGI all clients are reviewed against and must assert compliance
with the EGI service operations policy and top-level policy (see
).
EUDAT relies on self-assertions only, with no checking.
For a federation context, peer-reviewed self-audit could work, and
it should be at the organisation (NOT the client) level.
groups like "R&S" federations would make sense for this use case
* Marcus Hardt (KIT, WaTTS & OIDC-Agent)
The most interesting tool from the suite presented by Marcus would
(in his own words) be OIDC-Agent. Taken from the analogous "ssh-agent"
concept, it allows command-line forwarding of access tokens by
loading a 'refresh token' in a persistent agent process that can
be queried and used by CLI tools from various places.
Here, the scale of the problem has a potential (needs to be investigated!)
for an explosion of clients: #users x #devices -> 1M+ clients?
Adding one level of indirection (client-introduced clients) can help
mitigate the explosion, but is out of scope of the OIDCFed work.
There is a potential policy issue if client cannot be limited to act
only as sources of action (initiators): in general they could also
start acting as services which would be subject to other policies.
Limiting issuance to access tokens could solve this (but ask Marcus
for details - this is very much a rough thought)
If one can limit the client to act as an initiator only, the relevant
policy is 'just' the AUP and that could be implemented with a checkbox.
The concept of OIDC-Agent is very appealing to CLI-based infrastructures
and could be very useful for XSEDE!
Community Engagement
--------------------
Although relevance to the community is of course the best way to increase
engagement from RIs and EIs, it would also be beneficial to actually make
that relevance more visible. The OIDC Fed effort is one thing, but it needs
more publicizing in various forums in order to attract new RIs to the IGTF
as members. The realisation that federation is more than just some
technology and needs policies and assessments usually comes after a few
years - we can help out there.
Membership being a prerequisite for getting to the (RP-oriented) OIDCFed
of course will be a trigger in itself, but we should be better findable.
The other key value for RPs to join is that they can exchange ideas also
between themsleves, and share & influance developments in Snctfi and
policy development kits.
Potential target communities in the short term that sould want to be in
are the Life Sciences, LIGO-Virgo (for OIDC?), but also the SKA/AENEAS
community, who are now taking their first steps towards federation in
AENEAS WP6.1
There are also national communities to target (DAPHNE in the UK) and
we can find communities based on the AARC surveys (like those for the AUP)
Now it should just be clearer for the world that the IGTF can help here,
and that is both a working demonstrator (the AARC Pilot on this, with Mischa
and Jouke at Nikhef and JimB at XSEDE can help), as well as engaging
more strongly the EOSC-HUB and AARC communities.
There is also a role for WISE, and there we can dedicate time to
Snctfi and OIDC & policies based on the SCI framework.
The other component is good material to explain what can be done. There
are great experts at EGI (Sara) and at GEANT (Laura) whom we can
ask. And as a result, it would also help ourselves in clarifying what we
do, since it requires us to actually explain it in clear language!
Involved in this effort should aoso be the TAGPMA - it might help get
more funding ot Latin America if the OIDC elements are made more clear.
Talking opportunities:
- WISE in Abingdon (and the SCI session)
- APGridPMA and ISGC (guerrilla poster)
- an AARC InfoShare
- I2GS and TNC (in an AARC session)
- GEANT Connect glossy
- PEAR newsletter
Snctfi development and the Policy Development Kit for AARC
----------------------------------------------------------
The Scalable Negotiator for a Community Trust Framework in Federated
Infrastructures (Snctfi) model is an off-shoot of the SCIv1 framework
that was developed in AARC1 to support scalable policy negotiation
and group entities behind an IdP-SP-proxy (in the AARC Blueprint
Architecture) within a common policy set. It is a partially normative
framework that also requires compliance to Sirtfi (incident response) and
pur certain requirements on community policies and the organisation.
https://igtf.net/snctfi
With RPs becoming more important (e.g. in OIDCFed) this framework gets
a more important role, and is being used e.g. in EGI (and likely EOSC-HUB)
to structure some of the community-oriented policies. This then
covers both generic services as well as the new Thematic services in
EOSC-HUB (which has many communities and services working together).
There are several options on whcih to base the policy development kit
(PDK) that has been strongly requested by the user communities in AARC
and also by the EOSC-HUB Thematic Services. A possible basis (which of
course should be assessed and revised) is the current EGI SPG suite
https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/SPG:Documents
The PDK should in itself be more than just Snctfi, and address also
data protection (GDPR) guidelines; management of services, VMs, and
containers in (cloud) infras; the role of 'value-added resellers' and
community services that layer on top of these inside such containers,
and: they may depend on how the services are actually run. Are these
just 'user jobs' without privilege, or do they require sysadmin skills
by the operators?
At the same time, the AARC NA2 training activity needs policy elements
to support training for the communities, and an inventory of ideas was
made (see agenda page). For AARC the focus is (obviously) on the
research communities now, which form the cornerstone of the AARC pilots
and the training effort. Many of them have expressed the need to have
either a policy kit with templates or a set of policies they could
adopt 'as-is' for their community. The complementary aspect to this
is that the research communities - when using the generic EIs - will
have to abide by both the generic EI policy set as well as any augmented
policy requirements that are community specific.
Whenever structure of policy sets and documents is considered, the
result is a framework that essentially conforms to SCI, of which version 2
was adopted and endorsed recently (see the TNC17 pages for details). This
suggests to use SCIv2 as basis for organising the PDK, taking additional
inspiration fomr the EGI SPG policy suite already referenced above.
Each project or Infrastructure can then take elements from this policy
set and brand it appropriately - the development should preferably be
joint between all projects (both in Europe but also in the US, where
CTST has a similar initiative, re-using much of the foundational JSPG
work). Besides this joint session between AARC and the IGTF, also the
WISE community workshop and the SCIv3 WG should be involved.
There are several approaches then to the PDK suite:
1. a templating approach where communities can just fill-in the blanks
This has the advantage that all policies will be the same, but it makes
it harder to reach consensus, and in some cases projects do now want
to take a template because they want their uniqueness emphasises (like
OSG has done to the JSPG set).
2. a framework approach (like SCI), where each community develops a
policy set but - as long as all elements are addressed - is free in
content and wording
This can bring in many RIs and EIs, but the mapping exercise is
expensive (we know that from Bridge PKIs) and moreover there is
no common exchangeability, so (bilateral) protocols are needed to
make the mapping complete and acceptable to both parties.
3. a 'baseline' approach, where some elements are common to everyone
(the 'black-lined' text in a template), but it explicitly allows and
encourages the community to either make additions to each policy
statement, and to have a complementary policy that extends or augments
the baseline.
Then the 'baseline' should be sufficient to allow most use cases (e.g.
access to generic EIs), as well as put community specific statements
(e.g. the requirement in BBMRI to forbid attempts to reverse-engineer
pseudonymisation for data one has access to) in their logical place.
Of course, this can also be done with a policy document hierarchy.
The current line of thought favours using the grouping of the EGI SPG
policy set as a basis, but use initially a wide consultation process to
actually determine a baseline. Then model #3 is likely to be the
most convenient for communities as well as retain effectiveness for
interoperation across RIs and EIs.
Some policies in the PDK have more priority then others. Having a joint
AUP baseline is high on the community requirements list, as it is
imperative to show such an AUP to new users. Both EOSC-HUB but also
in AARC2 this was explicitly highlighted as an important need (and in AARC2
singled out in the DoW as well). The Community Policies (on which work
was done jointly by AARC NA3 and EGI ENGAGE in the summer of 2017)
are similarly high-ranked.
For access to the existing EIs (EGI, EUDAT) of course meeting their policy
requirements is necessary. Thus before interoperation (or service use) can
start the communities should agree also on the common set. For RIs, this
could be a statement such as "we have all SCIv2 policy elements in place,
AND we comply with the Baseline version X". For smaller communities, they
might just prefer to take the entire PDK suite as-is.
Short-term work:
- for the AARC2 review (May 2018): structure of the PDK defined (using
SCI and the EGI SPG grouping
- community-centric (Snctfi-compliance) polict templates in place
- AUP draft under discussion (see below)
Elements for data protection (GDPR) will be deferred until we know the
results of the DPCoCo version 2 work and whether the DPB (WP29) will
accept the idea - including the aspect of attribute authorities therein.
The elements of the PDK can also be used for the initial training suite.
An important element then would be a risk assessment by the community on
how much policy they need, and how statements (configurable variables
in a policy template) should be chosen. Not all communities may need
all policies, and e.g. for multi-factor (MFA) the need for it will depend
on a end-to-end risk assessment specific to the community. Potential
sources to look for risk-assessment training and methodologies are
also TF-DPR (Andrew Cormack) and the WISE RAW working group.
There should (and probably are) already flow charts and training on
how to do the risk assessment, and these should be re-used as far as
possible (maybe CTSC has something in this area).
Application-specific data protection needs will always be out
of scope for a generic PDK. It is clearly for Infrastructure Operations.
(keep in mind that a risk assessment is needed here - e.g. for data
breach notification where there is a 72hr cut-off limit for acting!)
AUP comparison and alignment study
----------------------------------
Ian Neilson in the context of AARC NA3 did a comparison of Acceptable
Use Policies for RIs and EIs, the result of which develop on the Wiki page
https://wiki.geant.org/display/AARC/NA3.3++e-Researcher-Centric+Policies
In quite a few cases, the joint original JSPG AUP ("Taipei Accord") is
still clearly visible: this is the case for EGI and EUDAT and WLCG. Others
have added significant new elements (like PRACE, where particular permissible
use elements like "peaceful use" are singled out, which in the other
versions are grouped under "purpose for which access has been granted" -
and we would expect that to have been covered in the review of the
project before granting access).
Other AUPs such as BBMRI and ELIXIR add community-specific (and very
important!) elements such as the obligation not to de-pseudonymise. In
general, such community specific statements can be 'layered' on top of a
generic AUP that would come from the EIs.
For PRACE, the 'community' typically equals the Home Site.
Site (organisational) AUPs typically branch out in to all kind of other
areas (such as permissible private use for employees) that are not relevant
to the RI/EI AUPs since - cleverly :) - the JSPG AUP immediately limits
their use to professional work only (and can do that because it is not
corporate or desktop IT).
At the moment, about a dozen AUPs has been analysed. The plan is to
extract a common (minimum) baseline and then make a template model on
which a hierarchy of policies (see the PDK discussion option #3) can be
built. A 'guide to usage of the template' should accompany the text.
The baseline should not be changed, as it would reduce the value
significantly - which also means the baseline should really be the
baseline (e.g. the set for generic EI only, not more). And since
this should preferably be global, wide consultation is needed: WISE,
with XSEDE, and in Europe the AEGIS consultation group can be used to
get adoption once it is near-complete.
Hopefully OSG can follow XSEDE - the new OSG security officer Susan should
be involved as well.
There is plenty of use and testing opportunities for a AUP template:
- EOSC-HUB
- the Helmholtz Data Federation (DE)
- DAPHNE (UK)
Timeline:
- before WISE have a joint AARC-EOSC-HUB discussion (TIIME?)
- develop a strawman AUP (maybe based on EGI/JSPG) WITH input from
EUDAT and PRACE (ask Ralph for that one)
this would start with the structure
- at WISE meeting: expose work and involve more people
- March: formalise v1 - in time for the AARC2 review please ;)
That version can also be used to develop some training (with Uros)
Assurance Profiles and Vectors
------------------------------
The new assurance profile guidance from NIST in SP800-63v3 is a
significant deviation from previous models. Now decomposing assurance
into three different 'vectors' (identity, authenticator, federation),
it should allow for more flexibility - for those of us able to actually
parse such composite assurance (there are none, really). A summary
is given the slides by Scott at
https://indico.nikhef.nl/event/1076/contribution/18/material/slides/0.pdf
The NIST specification itself consists of three documents (A..c) and there
is one planned (63D) that will address international mapping (certainly
to eIDAS, likely more). The international mapping was separated out due
to time constraints only.
Unlike for example the REFEDS Assurance Framework
https://wiki.refeds.org/display/CON/Consultation%3A+REFEDS+Assurance+Framework
it does not group combinations together into profiles, but leaves it
to the implementers to pick and combine (the idea was that vendors that
specialise in identity would need to look only at 63A and no other
documents, but since any assurance is always a combination of the three
elements, that will not quite work. To make risk-based decision for
any use case, the combination is essential.
The REFEDS RAF elements "identifier" and "association freshness"
are absorbed into identity in 63v3.
There are now plenty of profiles and vectors. The IGTF levels
of course are now in the IANA RFC6711 registry
https://www.iana.org/assignments/loa-profiles/
and there are 2 REFEDS RAF levels (capuccino and espresso) as in
the above document (the final version awaits resolution of the SFA
and MFA REFEDS profiles). And for comparing assurance between
infrastructures, the AARC JRA1.1 document gives the two IGTF
levels BIRCH and DOGWOOD as reference profiles, but additionally
introduced two hybrid levels (Darjeeling and Assam) to address
specific interop use cases. The draft is at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fi07J9lpUbqYTlPMINkbHl7xvA5tJ98L4jai6XNKbDM/view
Assurance Assessment Matrix
---------------------------
The (self) audit assessment matrix (for assurance profiles, not the
technology profiles) was reviewed for section 1-3. The methodology is
valid, but - as always - clarification is needed for some of the text.
Changes that would need revision of the Generalised Assurance Profile
document itself were deferred (but recorded so that they can be
incorporated in version 1.2). The latest version of the assessment
matrix can be found at
http://wiki.eugridpma.org/Main/AssuranceAssessment
Sharing and re-use of ideas and code
------------------------------------
Jens's Soapbox was dedicated to the the sharing of experiences. Until
recently the CAOPS working group was the go-to venue to exchange ideas
and also code and code snippets in the wider community. CAOPS attracted
people from the IGTF circle prober (such as Mike Jones), and provided
a place for technical discussions beyond the policy focus of the IGTF.
What we see in practice is that many authorities reinvent parts of a wheel,
and tools like OpenCA grow modifications of which the sharing would
benefit the community at large.
With enough collaboration, one could even start considering "CA as a Service",
given that copying (of CP/CPS and code) happens anyway. Attaching
credential repositories to services like the Pathfinder AAI CA (UK)
potentially share a lot with credential repositories for MasterPortals,
for example, and also there sharing ideas and code snippets might be
helpful.
(on that note: the Pathfinder AAI CA now uses per-assertion assurance
information conveys through Assent to determine eligibility for Birch
and compliance with Sirtfi - given that such meta-data is not readily
available otherwise)
Even the structure of an authority organisation could be shared. And
what in some cases is done with legal contracts (like for TCS) could
be re-used in a non-legal but more practical context (why not re-use
the model subscriber agreements as a guide as to what an admin should
consider when saying "yes, I do"?)
As a single sharing forum is impractical, the idea would be to deposit
code and code snippets (even in an non-beatified form) to a public
repository (say, Github), and have a common single place to refer to
these repositories. That common place can then be the existing
CAOPS Redmine project wiki (see https://redmine.ogf.org/dmsf/caops-wg)
This should be announced as well, though, maybe to the caops-wg@ list.
PMA operational matters, review, and accreditations
---------------------------------------------------
- For the pending self audits, the one for UGrid was completed
successfully, others are pending either updates or reviewer comments.
- MaGrid presented an update (close to a self-audit to be done soon)
and MARWAN could consider TCS as well. There are options in TCS
to issue without being part of eduGAIN. See
for the example
eduPKI is for eduroam use only (and kindly managed by DFN-CERT for GEANT)
- Specific measures have been taken with respect to non-responsing
authorities that could result in suspension from the distribution
- PLEASE look at the validUntil date of your Root and ICAs once in a while,
when you get a warning from the Chair, it's too late ...
- the new Grid-FR structure is now in place, with the issuance systems
operated by the French Ministry of Education. This makes it into
an on-line classic CA with HSM support, but using all the existing
RA processes and practices.
TCS was "not the chosen solution" for internal reasons (but Renater of
course happily does TCS for everything non-France Grilles)
The profiles (v1.1 of the CP/CPS) were reviewed and commented on, and
since it is very close to the existing practice
the v1.1 CP/CPS and new trust anchors were APPROVED and will be DISTRIBUTED
in the next release (end of Feb)
- RCauth.eu will be going through changes in governance, and additional
operational partners (GRNET for EGI.eu, STFC for EUDAT) will be
introduced. The PMA will have autonomy in the implementation of policy
and practices, and an operational team will report to it and ensure
trusted operation. Trusted people from the wider community (PKI experts
that have also federation knowledge and are involved with the communities)
will constitute the PMA. The Governance Board will be the org reps that
put resources (people, money) on the table.
The key could either be a single one shared by the three ops partners,
or there could be three distinct ICAs for RCauth. The latter is kind-of
ugly for the outside world. And since trust is needed anyway, the IGTF
has no objections to having a single key for all three partners.
When a partner withdraws from the operation, the ICA key may have
to be revoked and re-issued, through!
The key distribution ceremony must be described, and auditably
documented - in the new CP/CPS, therefore ;)
- the GridKa-CA self-aduit will be reviewed again and the (minor)
changes implemented in a new CP/CPS.
IPv6 CRL end-points will be there in Feb 2018; a SHA-1 root is still
fine, and if a subscriber organisation really wants to put in something
in a CAA record of their own, why not use "gridka.de" there.
Other updates
-------------
- The IGTF assurance profiles have been registered with IANA as per
RFC6711. Look in the registry at
https://www.iana.org/assignments/loa-profiles/
- As referenced in the TAGPMA update, there is now a Grid Community
Forum (GCF) with a Grid Community Toolkit (cgt) distribution which will
be the sustainable fork of the Globus(tm) Toolkit. The Globus open
source toolkit will no longer be supported by the Argonne team after
2018 (and during 2018 there will only be critical security updates).
Those using Globus can join the forum and contribute to the work on
GitHub:
Attendance
----------
We would like to thank the following members for the in-person attendance:
Jana Kejvalova, Jan Chvojka, Ingrid Schaeffner, Melanie Ernst, Marc
Turpin, Scott Rea, Dave Kelsey, Bouchra Rahim, Samia El Haddouti,
Ian Neilson, and DavidG
the RI and EI OIDC session contributors for attending the meeting:
Michal Prochazka, Davide Vaghetti, Marcus Hardt, Nicolas Liampotis,
Mischa Salle, and of course also our members Christos Kanellopoulos
and Licia Florio!
and for their extensive presence in the videoconference:
Miroslav, Vladimir, Roberto, Reimer, Mariam, Cosmin, Jens, Nuno,
John Kewley, Uros Stevanovic, and Hannah Short.