New Science Gateway Security Project Builds on CILogon Work

Post date: Aug 1, 2011 9:22:27 PM

A three-year project to improve security for science gateways used by researchers across the country gets under way today (Aug 1 2011), led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in collaboration with Indiana University, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Distributed Web Security for Science Gateways project, which is supported by a $948,821 grant from the National Science Foundation's Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure program, will enhance cyberinfrastructure for research and education by providing common software building blocks for science gateway security. These building blocks will facilitate secure connections between science gateways and other cyberinfrastructure, increasing the trust in science gateways by scientists and resource providers.

Science gateways broaden and simplify access to cyberinfrastructure by providing web-based interfaces to collaboration, analysis, data management, and other tools for students and researchers. The new project will provide authorization and delegation software for science gateways that complies with the standard OAuth protocol, which has been widely adopted in the Web 2.0, cloud, and social networking worlds. The project will build on prior work using OAuth to connect science gateways with CILogon and TeraGrid.