MyProxy 5.1 and GSI-OpenSSH 5.0 were released today, for inclusion in version 5.0.1 of the Globus Toolkit. These releases add usage reporting functionality from the Globus Metrics project to help the CILogon project collect generic statistics about use of the software, for reporting to the National Science Foundation, which provides funding for the CILogon project. The releases also include fixes for bugs reported by MyProxy and GSI-OpenSSH users.

GridShib-CA allows a user to authenticate using Shibboleth or OpenID and then creates and installs a short-lived grid credential based on that authentication on the user's local system. Version 2.0.0 improves on the previous release by adding support for OpenID and an open architecture that allows developers to extend functionality. For more details, see the release announcement.

Jim Basney will be presenting updates from the CILogon project at GlobusWorld 2010, to be held March 2-4 at Argonne National Laboratory. His slides will be available from the CILogon Documents page.

MyProxy 5.0 is now available from http://myproxy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. This release integrates usage reporting (see http://myproxy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/privacy) to enable the CILogon Project to measure usage of the MyProxy software over time for reporting to NSF. The release also includes improvements in MyProxy's trust root management capabilities. See the release announcement for more details.

The InCommon Federation announced that its community now includes more than 4 million end users from almost 200 participating organizations. The continued, strong growth in InCommon Federation membership will enable the CILogon Service to serve more researchers via their home organization logins.

Jim Basney and Von Welch participated in a Globus Security Committee investigation into the impact of the recently-disclosed man-in-the-middle vulnerability in the TLS protocol (CVE-2009-3555). The TLS protocol is used throughout the Globus Toolkit and other CI software. The committee concluded (see: announcement) that Globus Toolkit services, including MyProxy and GSI-OpenSSH, are not affected by the vulnerability, because they do not support TLS renegotiation after receiving application-level protocol data. Assisting with Globus Toolkit security issues is one of the community support activities of the CILogon project.

MyProxy 4.9 is now available from http://myproxy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/. This release improves support for MyProxy Session Passwords, which is a method of delegating proxy credentials via MyProxy using randomly-generated, short-lived passwords for use with password-based protocols that do not directly support proxy delegation. This MyProxy functionality was originally developed for MAEviz, and the new improvements were developed by request of the TeraGrid User Portal and GridChem projects. For more details on the many different ways MyProxy can be used, please see the MyProxy documentation.

At the 10th TAGPMA Face-to-Face Meeting on October 16, 2009 in Banff, Canada, Jim Basney presented the CILogon project's plan to deploy two certificate authorities as part of the CILogon Service. The CILogon project will pursue TAGPMA accreditation of a certificate authority operating at the "Silver" level of assurance. The TAGPMA is one of three regional members of the IGTF, which is the de facto standards body for defining levels of assurance for PKIs in production academic grids around the world. The slides from Jim's presentation are available from www.cilogon.org/docs.

NCSA has several Visiting Research Programmer positions available in the Cybersecurity Directorate. Applications must be submitted by October 27. Please see the NCSA Position Notice for more details. (Corrected, previously misstated closing date as October 23.)

The CILogon project held a one-day requirements-gathering workshop on September 29, 2009 to discuss challenges related to securely accessing cyberinfrastructure in the science and engineering community and solicit community input on the priorities for the project to address those challenges. The workshop report documents the workshop outcomes. Presentation slides from the workshop are attached to the Agenda page. Representatives attended from the following CI projects: DES, Hubzero, iCHASS/CCTS, iPlant, LIGO, LSST, LTER, nanoHUB, NVO, and OOI.