Authorisation Infrastructure for On-Demand Network Resource Provisioning

High performance Grid applications require high speed network infrastructure that should be capable to provide network connectivity service on-demand. This paper presents results of the development of the Authorisation (AuthZ) infrastructure for on-demand multidomain network resource provisioning (NRP). We propose a general Complex Resource Provisioning (CRP) model that can be used as a basis for AuthZ infrastructure development providing a common abstraction for provisioning both network and Grid resources. This model allows common policy expressions, using single user sign-on credentials when requesting and accessing complex Grid-Network resources. The implementation described is based on the generic AAA Authorisation Framework (GAAA-AuthZ) and suggests a number of security mechanisms and components that extends GAAA-AuthZ to achieve consistent policy enforcement and security context management: Token Validation Service (TVS), AuthZ ticket used for AuthZ session management, a special XACML profile for NRP, reference model for policy obligations handling (OHRM). The proposed infrastructure and solutions are being implemented in the framework of the EU project Phosphorus and use authors experiences gained from the major Grid based and Grid oriented projects