Security for Collaboration among Infrastructures

The Security for Collaborating Infrastructures (SCI) group is a collaborative activity of security staff from several large-scale distributed computing infrastructures, including EGI, OSG, PRACE, wLCG, and XSEDE. SCI is developing a framework to enable interoperation of collaborating Infrastructures with the aim of managing cross-infrastructure operational security risks and to build trust and develop policy standards for collaboration especially in cases where we cannot just share identical security policy documents.

In recent years we have seen the implementation of a variety of infrastructures supporting distributed computing environments and sharing of resources. Each such infrastructure consists of distributed computing resources, users (who may or may not be divided into separate user communities), and a set of policies and procedures. Examples of such infrastructures include computing and data infrastructures and/or clouds, as well as cooperating computing facilities managed by different organisations.
Even when such an infrastructure considers itself to be decoupled from other infrastructures, it is in fact subject to many of the same threats and vulnerabilities as other infrastructures because of the use of common software and technologies. Moreover, there may be users who take part in more than one infrastructure and are thus potential vectors that can spread infection from one infrastructure to another. Finally, one infrastructure may want to extend rights to use its resources to users who are enrolled in a different infrastructure.
In each of these situations, the infrastructures can benefit from working together and sharing information on security issues.

Documents

• A Trust Framework for Security Collaboration among Infrastructures
  Status: draft, version 0.95
  Formats available: MS Word, PDF

• A Trust Framework for Security Collaboration among Infrastructures, version 1, published in the Proceedings of the ISGC2013 conference

• Supporting material
  • About SCI - an introduction (Dave Kelsey, 1st WISE meeting
  • Evaluation spread sheet sample (also in ODF format)
  • SCI meetings
• Related work
  • Sirtfi - Security Incident Response Trust framework for Federated Identity


• Other versions:
  • Google Docs version (v0.8)
  • Version 0.92: MS Word, PDF
  • Version 0.93: MS Word, PDF