WS-PGRADE/gUSE Security - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 79

Chapter 6
WS-PGRADE/gUSE Security

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Abstract If any data is stored on publicly available services, then it is obligatory
for the service to apply different security policies in order to prevent information
leakage to unauthorized users. This also applies to e-Science gateways, where
sensitive (for example, medical) data might be stored. Moreover, e-Science gateways
usually enable the usage of distributed computing infrastructures that apply some
sort of authentication, which should either be provided by the users, or be completely
hidden and implemented inside the gateway in the form of robot credentials. In this
chapter we discuss some aspects of security applied within WS-PGRADE/gUSE.

6.1 Introduction

Security of e-Science gateways is an important topic. The gateway offers easy
access to different distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) that can be used to
process the data of the e-scientist, mostly of sensitive nature (for example, patient
data). It follows from this, that securing access to the gateways, its services, the
infrastructure, and the data accessed by them is of major importance.
In this chapter we discuss different aspects of security related to e-Science
gateways: how the gateways can be accessed, how access to their services can be
limited, and how the included components can be made secure. Finally we present
two possible approaches for using credentials to access the computing infrastructure
and data behind the gateways. The chapter tries to discuss this topic in general, but
in order to ease understanding, we present a real use-case of WS-PGRADE/gUSE.