CILogon 2.0

The CILogon 2.0 project has now concluded. All the functionality developed during the project has been incorporated into the CILogon subscription service.

When scientists work together, they use web sites and other software to share their ideas and data. To ensure the integrity of their work, these systems require the scientists to log in and verify that they are part of the team working on a particular science problem. Too often, the identity and access verification process is a stumbling block for the scientists. Scientific research projects are forced to invest time and effort into developing and supporting Identity and Access Management (IdAM) services, distracting them from the core goals of their research collaboration. The "CILogon 2.0" project provides an IdAM platform that enables scientists to work together to meet their IdAM needs more effectively so they can allocate more time and effort to their core mission of scientific research. To ensure that the project makes a real contribution to scientific collaborations, the researchers have partnered with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center, and the Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE). The project also provides training and outreach to additional scientific collaborations, and the project supports integration with the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which provides a national-scale cyberinfrastructure for scientific research in the US.

Prior to the "CILogon 2.0" project, the CILogon and COmanage projects separately developed platforms for federated identity management and collaborative organization management. Federated identity management enables researchers to use their home organization identities to access cyberinfrastructure, rather than requiring yet another username and password to log on. Collaborative organization management enables research projects to define user groups for authorization to collaboration platforms (e.g., wikis, mailing lists, and domain applications). The "CILogon 2.0" project integrates and expands on the existing CILogon and COmanage software to provide an integrated Identity and Access Management (IdAM) platform for cyberinfrastructure. This IdAM platform serves the unique needs of research collaborations, namely the need to dynamically form collaboration groups across organizations and countries, sharing access to data, instruments, compute clusters, and other resources to enable scientific discovery. The project provides a software-as-a-service platform to ease integration with cyberinfrastructure, while making all software components publicly available under open source licenses to enable re-use.