Centralizing Science?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

Years ago many universities had their own research telescopes and small accelerators. But as the demands, as well as the costs, of science increased, researchers quickly realized they had to consolidate their resources and build instruments that served the needs of hundreds or thousands of researchers around the globe. Virtually of all today’s big science instruments such as telescopes, particle accelerators, and synchrotrons are multi-country collaborations.

Research computing may be headed in the same direction.

The next generation of super-computers and research cloud infrastructure required for things like climate modeling, weather forecasting, or epidemiological studies, which will require massive amounts of energy to operate. The energy costs alone may compel international partnership to deploy and build such infrastructure on the same scale of global collaboration as we have seen for telescopes and particle accelerators.

Big Science facilities need to think about emissions.

More importantly with the growing threat of climate change it is critical that such facilities not be major sources of CO2 emissions in their own right. Some examples:

• The new climate modeling super computer in Exeter in the UK
• The recently constructed NCAR data center in Wyoming.

We are already seeing early signs of such research-computing collaborations. Examples:

• The investigation by CERN to relocate its data center to Nordic countries,
• The examination, by universities in the Boston area to relocate their computing facilities to a small municipal hydro-electric facility 90 miles west of Boston.

Potential cost savings

Global collaboration will also significantly save individual universities millions of dollars in electrical costs as research computing currently represents 15-30% of the electricity consumption at many universities. The energy savings alone could possibly pay for this next generation of research computing and still leave additional money to support critical research.

Obviously high speed optical networks and open lightpath exchanges will be critical to such a reality. But it is just as important that energy and environmental savings not be transferred to the higher costs in the network and so new low-carbon network architectures are needed as well.

Do you see this as the future of research computing?

---

About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.

Browserless Federated SignOn Techniques Contrasted: Shibboleth/ECP and ABFAB/Moonshot

One of the key puzzle pieces for federated ID is how to deal with sign on outside the browser. When you peek behind the curtain of the web  you will see tools like SSH and SCP and jobs running on machines pushing content everywhere and people signing in to accomplish tasks ill suited for the web.  In other areas you’ll see people wanting to use their ID to sign into a cloud application on their smartphone (like mail) or a specialized application on their desktop (think Google Earth).

We want to mask some of the complexity of using a Federated ID behind the curtain as much as we can and only reveal what is REALLY needed to get the job done.  In this posting we’ll be exploring two candidate technologies to do this.

WARNING! Some technical content ahead!    Ok, this posting  may be a bit of a technical read, but I’ve tried to keep the acronyms to a minimum.  I am also assuming that you know a bit about Single Sign On techniques and have slightly more than a passing familiarity with Shibboleth and SAML.

So put on your gear for something beyond a shallow dive, but not the full deep dive it could be, I don’t think you’ll get the bends but if the comments drag us into that territory don’t blame me

The Contenders

We are going to take a look at two approaches to non web sign on; Shibboleth with the ECP (Enhanced Client or Proxy) plugin and the IETF’s ABFAB (Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web) that was formally known as Project Moonshot.  Both techniques have their merits and drawbacks.  I hope that  by offering this comparison I can help identify some of the things to think about and hear back from others about how on target (or not) I am with the analysis.

Non Web Federated ID Use Cases

Use cases take the shape of many things:

• IMAP mail access for your smartphone
• plain SSH/SFTP for secure shell access
• A rich or ‘fat’ client that leverages local graphic and compute capabilities.
• Insert your clever outside the browser use of id/passwords.

Use Case: Mail in the Cloud

This is/was slide 51 from the Live@edu slide deck from one of their TechNet in late 2010 (credit: Microsoft).  It illustrates the use of the Microsoft Federation Gateway communicating with Shib ECP for authentication.  The end users offers their userid scoped with their domain (e.g. joe@my-university.ca) and the ‘hint’ of the domain allows the gateway component to direct the authentication request to the appropriate ECP enabled interface.  This hint is not part of the SAML protocol at all, but a function of how the cloud service provider will route the request it receives to the right provider. The password DOES transit the cloud  so it is up to the Identity Provider to have sufficient assurance from the vendor that the right steps are taken (e.g. IMAPS, safe transit within the cloud etc).

The reply by the Shibboleth IdP via a reverse SOAP call (PAOS, yes soap written in reverse) and carries a special identifier for the Live@EDU service: PersistentID.  This value is special to the cloud mail service as it links the person to their mailbox.  My understanding from IdPs participating in this space is that the PersistentID is generated upon account creation in the institutions person registry.It is just an attribute passed over the wire instead of a dynamically computed attribute like eduPersonTargetedID. It is also BASE32 encoded which eduPersonTargetID is not.

Use Case: Federation Aware Rich Desktop Client

Screenshots of some of the OpenJump documentation that uses SAML. OpenJump deals with the discovery issue by having you as the user enter the Metadata URL into the actual application.  Good? Bad?  Well, you judge, but if you say bad, help us understand how you would do it to minimize the user managed discovery aspect? Hand waves don’t cut it, please be specific…

Key Considerations – Tipping Point Concerns

You can argue that we need to look at many facets of the conversation, but I contend that there exists tipping point ones you need to pay attention to and are the key drivers — these are ‘the who’ and ‘the what’. Once you wrestle those to the ground, the rest will follow when going through a comparison on what to use in your situation.

The Who

‘The who’ is your audience of users and the important question to ask about them is ‘How diverse a group are they?’  If you can influence/control the diversity as in keep them all originating from the same bucket, then this may work to your advantage — more on this in a moment.  If you can’t and are talking about a diverse set of users originating from many identity providers then this is important too.  In either case, there will always be an identity provider of last resort to capture the corner cases and our goal is to minimize this set as much as possible.

The What

‘The what’ is what are you trying to deliver or improve?  Are you trying to allow a smartphone or tablet access to their email or are you trying to allow SSH/SFTP access to unix boxen under your control?  Are you trying to do both?  Your endpoints you want to serve are going to influence your selection.

Comparing and Contrasting

The table below highlights some of the comparison points to be considered:

	Shibboleth+ECP	Moonshot/ABFAB
Password Treatment	Userid/Password pair seen & transits outside classic Shibboleth infrastructure boundaries	Userid/Password seen @ endpoint & transits through RADIUS infrastructure via SSL tunnel
Home Institution Discovery	Somehow preconfigured either via user or by static configuration in proxy & proxy under an infrastructure providers control	Userid contains hint to institution so it is present in credential and implicitly discoverable on usage (e.g. <id>@realm.ca)
Attribute Exchange	Exchanged via SAML2, aggregated via standard Shibboleth fashion (DB/LDAP/static values etc)	Exposed via GSS API, delivered via RADIUS pack/unpack technique, aggregated from many potential sources
‘Breadth’ of accounts	ECP configuration or end user intervention drives breadth of coverage	If RADIUS uses eduroam, entire set of  federation accounts are available
Environment Used in	Mobile devices, IMAP clients, very targeted and controlled infrastructures. Unix machines with a preconfigured Id Provider.	Unix shell environments, rich clients, anywhere that the GSS-API exists.

There are more, but to me these are the big ones.  I’m sure there are readers out there that have thoughts, so please share them and I’ll see if they fit in.

Conclusions…for now

If you were looking for me to declare one method over the other, I’m sorry to disappoint — the answer is of course it depends.  It will depend on how you respond to  ’the who’ and ‘the what’ and then feed that into the calculation of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the approach you choose.

Some of these things are going to be intangibles too, like ‘are you staffed with the right skills?’ and ‘how many calls to the helpdesk can you avoid?’.  I think anyone going through the decision process on deploying one or the other or even both needs to think about the big picture topics.

I accept that this comparison is incomplete but I believe it to be complete enough for the purpose of kick starting a dialog about it. I look forward to the comments and emails to see how well my position holds…

R&E Network Model of the Future?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

There is a growing momentum among the major Research & Education (R&E) networks around the world to move to Open Lightpath Exchanges (OLEs where, as Cees de Laat explains, hybrid networks meet to:

• exchange traffic
• facilitate international interconnections
• minimize quantity of colo, equipment and cards required
• minimize call blocking probability at optical exchange points

OLEs will fundamentally change the future of R&E networking. At the spring 2011 Internet2 meeting and in follow-up discussion at the Terena meeting, a joint statement was drafted representing the views of many of the attendees on why OLEs are so critical to the future of R&E networking and represent significant opportunity for network innovation.

OLEs Allow Choice

OLEs will allow individual institutions, even researchers to directly peer with each other with no policy constraints and eliminate or minimize the need for a traditional “network.” Point-to-point links will still be required

Virtual Infrastructure: The diagram above shows how virtual infrastructures are created. They are assembled by creating « slices » of the physical substrates, which are then aggregated into a working virtual infrastructure from which services can be delivered. The physical infrastructure consists mainly of servers, disc arrays and network elements such as switches and routers, whereas the virtual infrastructure consists of virtual machines, virtual storage, virtual routers and virtual switches. (Image courtesy: GreenStar Network)

between exchange points and these will need to be provisioned through a variety of means. But now it is the choice of those who connect to the OLE, whether it is an institution, researcher or virtual organization, to compose their own network topology.

As some of you may remember this was one of the original concepts of the CA*net 3/CA*net 4 (CANARIE) architecture and drove the design of Universal Commerce Language and Protocol (UCLP). I am pleased to see that Internet2’s Open Science, Scholarship and Services Exchange (OS3E) (http://www.internet2.edu/network/ose/) is a similar strategy in this regard.

The driver for these developments, of course, is the demand of big science. But just as importantly OLEs will enable a new wave in network innovation with such new concepts as “software defined networks,” “Just in time networking,” “network as a service,” “pay as you go networking,” etc. OLE architecture is also a fundamental underpinning for zero carbon networks like the GreenStar Network which is based on a hub (OLE) and spoke model.

Financial Challenges

No question OLEs may cause serious financial challenges for many regional networks and NRENs, as institutions and researchers need only pay for direct costs of interconnecting at an OLE as opposed to a bundled membership package.

But I still believe there will be a critical role for R&E networks of all types. In the future the major focus of their revenue I believe will not be in provisioning pipes or IP networks, but in new network services such as national 5G wireless initiatives, content peering and distribution, outsourcing campus IT and managing science DMZ, energy CO2 reduction services in relocating data centers to remote locations, supporting continent-wide or global cyber-infrastructure or e-Infrastructure.

What are the implications of the OLE concept for Canadian R&E networks?

---

About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.

Disturb. Dislocate. Disorder. Disrupt?

Contributing author: Bill St. Arnaud

Some argue that the role of Research & Education (R&E) networks should only be as a low-cost Internet service provider to the R&E community.

Others counter that R&E networks should focus on providing services to support e-Science and perhaps even integrate with other e-Infrastructure providers such as High-Performance Computing (HPC) and grid.

And yet still others argue that R&E networks should work closely with industry by providing testbeds to develop and/or improve industry products and enable commercialization of university R&D.

In my opinion R&E networks can play far more important role, first in supporting e-Science, but also in helping industry and creating a knowledge society by being an innovative “disrupter.” This is where R&E networks have been hugely successful in the past:

• first in the build out of the original Internet,
• next in deployment of low-cost user-owned fibre networks,
• and more recently in areas of new architecture for low-carbon Internet networks and global authentication schemes.

These disruptive developments were first intended, in many cases, to support the needs of science, but also had a beneficial effect of creating new network business models and enabling knowledge transformation of society as a whole.

I am pleased to see that we are now on the verge of another disruptive change with respect to R&E networks.

Once again, while these network transformations are first being driven by the needs of eScience the network architectures are starting already to have a beneficial effect on broadband architectures in general. A good example, of course, is the unique facilitation role that Internet2 is playing in the rollout of national broadband through its partnership in UCAN. Other examples include the deployment of community transit exchange points by BCNET and peering points by KAREN in New Zealand.

Do you see R&E networks as disruptive technologies?

---

About the author

Bill St. Arnaud, formerly a Chief Research Officer at CANARIE, is a Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation Internet and practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and electrical highways. He currently also works as a consultant at CANARIE.

What could the open wireless movement learn from eduroam?

Prologue:

Welcome to my first formal blog posting.  I’ve resisted for years but recently have been getting more and more involved online and have found that blogging is the instrument of choice to respond to and propagate your personal perspective online.  Participating in the blogosphere reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s take on Social Capital so if I’m going to get in on it, I might as well jump in with both feet.  Let the fun and games begin and I hope I provoke some interesting discussion because isn’t that what blogging is all about?  Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back for more. Now on with the show…

What Could the Open Wireless Movement Learn from Eduroam?

As I was reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) article bemoaning the loss of open access points  across the land I was struck by how closely it tracked the final chase scene  in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It’s the one where Ferris is running home but going through people’s back yards as the quick way to get home.  If you are looking for your dose of 80s flashback, here’s the clip

That’s what I think using someones access point uninvited is like…a little exciting, but really crosses into  someones private space (that’s why people build fences, right?) but the shortcut accomplishes your goal at the sacrifice of someones privacy and rights.   As a scene in the movie, it’s great, Ferris gets home but is it really like that in reality? Are open wireless points free game for those who walk by?  As enticing as it is, the risk of transiting someone’s wi-fi ranks up there with don’t talk to strangers and don’t hitchhike: you never know what trouble you are going to get into.

What caught my eye though was the exclamation of “We need WiFi that is open and encrypted at the same time!” and immediately thought of the eduroam service that is part of the Canadian Access Federation .  How does this let you get online? If your institution participates with eduroam there are two main elements.  Allowing access to other eduroam participants and in return you have access to the others participants network.  To do this, you need to have an 802.1x ready wi-fi network and RADIUS as an available technology to support the eduroam SSID.  To use the service you connect with your network_id@your_institution_here.com and you are signed in through the use of chained RADIUS proxy servers.  The simplicity of this is that ANYWHERE you see eduroam, the experience is the same.  In fact, in most cases, you will have signed in automatically  anytime you open your laptop or even walk by with your smartphone, it will connect and you are online.  This has happened to me numerous times.  My favorite was when arriving at the Internet2 spring members meeting hotel and not even checked in at 11pm at night, my phone was already online with eduroam.  No fuss no muss, it just works.

So how prevalent is this in Canada?  Well at the time of writing the AUCC folks  say there are 95 universities registered and 27 of them or 28%  are participating in the Canadian Access Federation which operate the Canadian eduroam presence. Europe coverage is even higher.

In the US there are approximately the same number of sites live (27 according to the map at the time of writing) and another 20 or so more either interested or actively testing out of thousands of universities.  It is hard to explain why the uptake is not as big as Canada or elsewhere.  It can have something to do with being 802.1x ready or maybe it is just not rated high enough priority.  It’s hard to say.

Membership has its privileges.

With eduroam, reciprocity is a big part of the service and has a lot of benefits.  The active Ids inyour system have the ability to roam to other institutions but when someone comes to yours, you don’t have to provision them to get on the network. Opening the laptop really equates to getting online and there’s nothing more satisfying to a traveller that to being able to get online without having to follow some 7 and a half step process to signing in. I was recently at the TERENA conference which had great eduroam coverage and never used my termporary id.  The TERENA conference had 500+ people, 800+ devices connected via eduroam (one person has both a laptop and smartphone/ipad) and had >10,000 authentications over 5 days.

At a recent TERENA conference, hundreds of attendees used eduroam and their home credentials and could ignore the temporary userid/password. 

What about security you ask? Eduroam uses 802.1x and WPA2 protocols and your credential is verified at the home institution.  As for what the acceptable use policies (AUPs) are, as the visitor your are expected to abide by your home institutions and the one in which you are a visitor to.  It is all authenticated using your identity so transiting the network is permitted, but not anonymously.

So can just anyone sign up to be on eduroam?  In short, no.  it is geared to higher education institutions and there is a reciprocity balance to be struck.  It is plausible that if one location were to not participate according to the community’s expectations that branch (aka country root server) could be orphaned from the eduroam trust-framework.

Coming full circle, what does this mean to the EFF plea for technology? Is eduroam for them?  Possibly, but unlikely.  Whoever implements wouldn’t even come close to meeting eligibility and then there’s this hard question to answer of whose password store to authenticate against.  I can see the eduroam technique being duplicated much like the dynamic DNS folks who are now found in the actual routers firmware.  So, in theory, you could enable this  ’feature at your convenience as a personal decision to contribute bandwidth to the common good’.  There are still a bunch of challenges to overcome to meet the EFF free wifi service: administration, findability, getting the word out, does it violate your AUP with your internet provider all come to mind. At the end of the day though it needs to be ubiquitous,  something that works without too much fuss, and is straightforward  for both the enduser and the access point maintainer — kind of like eduroam