Linking Authenticating and Authorising Infrastructures in the UK NGI (SARoNGS)

The UK NGS aims to provide simple trusted access to digital services for the UK’s research community, in particular but not limited to Grid and Cloud provision. To achieve this we have to satisfy conditions laid down by three types of entities: individuals, resources, and the identification and attribute authorities who vouch for them. We have to set the bar high enough to satisfy resource owners, low enough to let most legitimate users in and yet also satisfy legal requirements. This makes it difficult if not impossible to fit one access mechanism to all stakeholders. SARoNGS was a JISC funded technical project that was developed in the UK to apply a federated access model (The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research, based upon Shibboleth) to the grid environment. It resulted in a production service supported by the UK NGI to issue grid credentials, obtain Virtual Organisation Membership Service (VOMS) assertions and place them within reach of the user so to provide access these online digital services. We present the details of this service, the ways we joined the loose ends together, the remaining issues and future directions.