David Orrell will be giving a paper at this year's Terena Networking Conference entitled 'Moonshot-enabled Federated Access to Cloud Infrastructure'. Moonshot is a project led by JANET(UK) to develop technology to enable federated-access beyond Web-based services.

From the abstract for the paper:

We show how Moonshot-enabled infrastructure can be provisioned via the cloud service portal and SSH access gained using federated login. Our work integrates the traditional Web-based SAML authentication to the portal with a Moonshot-enabled SSH server on the newly provisioned infrastructure. We show how by configuring the infrastructure, the portal can enable the user who is provisioning the cloud server to gain seamless ‘root’-access to the server over SSH, by authenticating with their home organisation’s credentials. Further to this, we set policy on the SSH server to enable SAML attributes, obtained from a users home organisation, to be used to map to local user accounts on the cloud server, with differing levels of access permission. This allows multiple end-users of the infrastructure to also gain access using federated login.

This work demonstrates end-to-end federated access from provisioning of the infrastructure through to end-user access to the cloud servers, thus reducing the burden of managing credentials or SSH keys on cloud infrastructure.

Visit the conference website to register to attend or for more information.