A Note on the Integration of Security Capabilities with Advanced Portals

Bringing BEinGRID Security Capabilities together with Portals Capabilities
David Brossard, BT Innovate & Design
Stathis Karanastasis , National Technical University of Athens

Security and Portals are two important thematic areas investigated in the BEinGRID project. As result of their activities, both areas have produced a wide number of software solutions that complement each other. Security focuses on end-to-end secure communications and enterprise security in distributed, service-oriented environments. The Portals area focuses more on user interaction, job management, file management, and in the particular area of security, on the provisioning and management of security credentials.
Starting from a gap analysis of the results achieved in each area, the main integration points have been identified and three business scenarios showing the benefits of integrating the Security and Portals capabilities are described.
The first scenario explains how the Identity Broker solution of the Security area can support the Single Sign-Up mechanism implemented in the User Management capability of the Portals area. The second scenario illustrates how the Authorization Service of the Security area can be applied to Portals to reflect true business interactions. Lastly, the third one presents a governance portal solution for the management of distributed security components by developing an integrated management layer that binds together all the security components of both areas (Portals Security, Identity Broker, Authorization service, Governance Gateway, User Management).
The above cases are contextualised in a concrete collaborative engineering (CE) scenario where three distributed organisations collaborate in order to design and prototype a product.
For more information on the scenarios, interested readers can refer to the full whitepaper.
The whitepaper can be useful in supporting the adopters of the Portal and Security solutions in understanding the potential impact and benefits of designing and developing a solution integrating both the results.
The combination of security and portal capabilities is recommended to the adopters of BEinGRID solutions since it covers a wider range of security issues: from the user to the end service or resource being protected.

For more information on the scenarios

David Brossard
BT Innovation & Design – PP13D Orion Ground Floor – Adastral Park – Martlesham Heath IP5 3RE – England
Email: david.brossard(at)bt.com

Stathis Karanastasis
National Technical University of Athens – 9 Iroon Polytechniou, Zografou – 15773, Greece
Email: karanastasis(at)telecom.ntua.gr