Géant-TrustBroker: Dynamic, Scalable Management of SAML-Based Inter-federation Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures

Abstract

Part 7: Identity ManagementInternational audienceWe present the concept and design of Géant-TrustBroker, a new service to facilitate multi-tenant ICT service user authentication and authorization (AuthNZ) management in large-scale eScience infrastructures that is researched and implemented by the pan-European research and education network, Géant. Géant-TrustBroker complements eduGAIN, a successful umbrella inter-federation created on top of national higher education federations in more than 20 countries world-wide. Motivated by experiences with real-world limits of eduGAIN, Géant-TrustBroker’s primary goal is to enable a dynamic and highly scalable management of identity federations and inter-federations. Instead of eduGAIN’s federation-of-federations approach, Géant-TrustBroker enables the on-demand establishment and life-cycle management of dynamic virtual federations and achieves a high level of automation to reduce the manual workload for the participating organizations, which so far is one of the most significant obstacles for the adoption of Federated Identity Management, e.g., based on the SAML standard. We contrast Géant-TrustBroker with other state-of-the-art approaches, present its workflows and internal mode of operations and give an outlook to how eduGAIN can be used in combination with Géant-TrustBroker to solve current AuthNZ problems in international research projects and communities

An overview of limitations and approaches in identity management

“…Other approaches focus on federation as a service, which utilizes cloud infrastructure. The framework AIDF by Zouari and Hamdi [88] makes use of a trust broker, like in [58]…”

“…Furthermore, the division into trusted, semi-trusted, and untrusted is rather coarsegrained [REQ6], and a further database per entity is needed [REQ11]. Another approach is called TrustBroker by Pöhn et al[58], which is based on SAML, though the generic concepts can be applied to FIM[REQ3]. There are also other federation approaches.…”

The computer for the 21st century: present security & privacy challenges

“…These characteristics are very important for the interoperability between security technologies of different administrative domains to be accomplished. According to [151,178,179], the first step toward achieving interoperability is the adoption of SAML. However, XML-based SAML is not a lightweight standard and has a high computational cost for IoT resource-constrained devices [176].…”

Risk Management for Dynamic Metadata Exchange via a Trusted Third Party

“…Since more and more services are offered on-demand, the practical problem and relevant question is, if the SAML metadata, required to make use of FIM, can be exchanged securely on-demand. This article adds security considerations and a risk management based on a template to the GÉANT-TrustBroker approach (Pöhn et al, 2014). The new approach, initiated by the eduGAIN operators (GÉANT project), needs to be as secure as FIM with SAML can be, even though new components and workflows are introduced.…”

“…By that, if IDP and SP technically do not know each other, the TTP triggers the metadata exchange on-demand. This approach is also described in (Pöhn et al, 2014), where the state of the art, basic concepts, workflows, and database design were explained. As only the necessary metadata is exchanged, this significantly improves the scalability of the metadata exchange, while at the same time avoids performance bottlenecks.…”