NDG Security Server-side components package

NDG Security is the security system for the UK Natural Environment Research Council funded NERC DataGrid. NDG Security has been developed to provide users with seamless federated access to secured resources across NDG participating organisations whilst at the same time providing an underlying system which is easy to deploy around organisation's pre-existing systems.

More recently the system has been developed in collaboration with the US DoE funded Earth System Grid project for the ESG Federation an infrastructure under development in support of CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5), a framework for a co-ordinated set of climate model experiments which will input into the forthcoming 5th IPCC Assessment Report.

NDG and ESG use a common access control architecture. OpenID and MyProxy are used to support single sign on for browser based and HTTP rich client based applications respectively. SAML is used for attribute query and authorisation decision interfaces. NDG Security uses a XACML based policy engine from the package ndg_xacml. NDG Security has been re-engineered to use a filter based architecture based on WSGI enabling other Python WSGI based applications to be protected in a flexible manner without the need to modify application code.