CILogon Service Planned

Post date: Aug 28, 2009 6:10:37 PM

NCSA researchers receive NSF grant to deploy cyberinfrastructure logon service.

Von Welch, Randy Butler, and Jim Basney of NCSA's Cybersecurity Directorate have received a three year $1,750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate, deploy, and support an open source, standards-based cyberinfrastructure logon (CILogon) service, providing the NSF research community with credentials for secure access to cyberinfrastructure. The service will bridge the identity credentials generated by the nation's universities, through the InCommon Federation, to a credential that will satisfy the authentication and authorization needs of NSF's cyberinfrastructure projects.

"A researcher's access to NSF's cyberinfrastructure is today complicated by the lack of a broadly accepted cyber identity," said Welch, the project's principal investigator and co-director of NCSA's Cybersecurity Directorate. "In order to use NSF cyberinfrastructure, researchers must go through a credentialing process for that project. Leveraging InCommon means allowing researchers to re-use the existing login they have for their campus."