ESnet authentication services and trust federations

ESnet provides authentication services and trust federation support for SciDAC projects, collaboratories, and other distributed computing applications. The ESnet ATF team operates the DOEGrids Certificate Authority, available to all DOE Office of Science programs, plus several custom CAs, including one for the National Fusion Collaboratory and one for NERSC. The secure hardware and software environment developed to support CAs is suitable for supporting additional custom authentication and authorization applications that your program might require. Seamless, secure interoperation across organizational and international boundaries is vital to collaborative science. We are fostering the development of international PKI federations by founding the TAGPMA, the American regional PMA, and the worldwide IGTF Policy Management Authority (PMA), as well as participating in European and Asian regional PMAs. We are investigating and prototyping distributed authentication technology that will allow us to support the 'roaming scientist' (distributed wireless via eduroam), as well as more secure authentication methods (one-time password tokens)