Torsten Braun, User and Machine Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure for Distributed Testbeds

The Wisebed wireless sensor network testbed provides a federated experimentation facility covering several European universities. For scalable management of access control we have designed and implemented a single-sign-on and attribute-based authentication and authorization infrastructure based on the Shibboleth software, which has been developed by the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. Shibboleth is usually used for protecting browser-based access of web resources. We have designed and implemented an extension to protect web services using the Simple Object Access Protocol. This extension allows both user and machine authentication for web services. As a proof of concept, we implemented a complete reservation system for sensor nodes in the Wisebed test-bed federation. Two different user interfaces based on a web page and an iPhone application have been implemented. Although implemented for Shibboleth, the architecture can be easily adapted to other authentication and authorization infrastructures. About the speaker: Torsten Braun got his Ph.D. degree from University of Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1993. From 1994 to 1995 he has been a guest scientist at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France). From 1995 to 1997 he has been working at the IBM European Networking Centre Heidelberg (Germany) as a project leader and senior consultant. He has been a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Bern (Switzerland) since 1998 and director of the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at University of Bern since 2007. He has been member of the SWITCH (Swiss education and research network) board of trustees since 2001.