Audited credential delegation: a usable security solution for the virtual physiological human toolkit

Abstract

We present applications of audited credential delegation (ACD), a usable security solution for authentication, authorization and auditing in distributed virtual physiological human (VPH) project environments that removes the use of digital certificates from end-users' experience. Current security solutions are based on public key infrastructure (PKI). While PKI offers strong security for VPH projects, it suffers from serious usability shortcomings in terms of end-user acquisition and management of credentials which deter scientists from exploiting distributed VPH environments. By contrast, ACD supports the use of local credentials. Currently, a local ACD username -password combination can be used to access grid-based resources while Shibboleth support is underway. Moreover, ACD provides seamless and secure access to shared patient data, tools and infrastructure, thus supporting the provision of personalized medicine for patients, scientists and clinicians participating in e-health projects from a local to the widest international scale.

IMENSE: An e-infrastructure environment for patient specific multiscale data integration, modelling and clinical treatment

“…The fact that ACD is based on a formal model means that it is well documented and can be certified in the future. Finally, the design of ACD is flexible enough to accommodate changes in the security policy, such as adding new roles and providing fine grained authorization [41].…”

“…Audited Credential Delegation [40,41] (ACD) is a security wrapper that can be integrated with the functionality of a software system to provide authentication, authorization and auditing security goals. ACD can also be used to set up several virtual organizations (VO) that have specific goals.…”

A lightweight platform for managing biomedical simulation

“…In some of the simulation scenarios considered by the project, the cloud platform will not be able meet the computational requirements of some workflow components, meaning that effort is underway in the VPH-Share project to develop a service that will allow seamless interoperation between the cloud infrastructure and grids of high performance computing resources. The Application Hosting Environment [14] (AHE) and Audited Credential Delegation [8] (ACD) fulfil this important task of providing grid access from the cloud platform.…”

Clinically driven design of multi-scale cancer models: the ContraCancrum project paradigm

“…GSEngine is connected to the Application Hosting Environment (AHE) [42] server in order to launch computational simulations across a range of distributed computing resources, and to the data environment in order to access the clinical and imaging data on which the simulations are based. Security of data and access to remote resources are provided via the Audited Credential Delegation [43,44] extension to the AHE.…”