Abstract

Mixing the Public and the Private: Security in the Virtual Observatory

Raymond Plante (NCSA)

Raymond Plante (NCSA), Bill Baker (NCSA), Chris Miller (NOAO), Matthew Graham (Caltech)

The vast majority of data and services that are available today through the Virtual Observatory (VO) are public and open to anyone. It is the volume and variety of open data that discourages traditional modes of downloading data and pushes more of the scientific process onto an on-line environment. As our personal research begins to mingle with these open resources, privacy and security become important. In this talk, we will review developments in the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) and the international VO community to provide users with secure access to restricted resources. In particular, we want to provide secure storage for results of large queries and data analysis, allow users to integrate their proprietary data from observatories with public data from archives in the same environment, and allow service providers to share limited computational resources equitably to their users. We will discuss our approach to making security easy and convenient, including our approach to single sign-on to multiple portals, highlighting its current use in the NOAO NVO portal. We will also discuss current developments to incorporate emerging standards such as OpenID, creating strong credentials via identity validation and two-factor authentication, and integrating with local standards and practices.

Mode of presentation: oral