Trust as the Foundation of Resource Exchange in GENI

Abstract

Researchers and educators in computer science and other domains are increasingly turning to distributed test beds that offer access to a variety of resources, including networking, computation, storage, sensing, and actuation. The provisioning of resources from their owners to interested experimenters requires establishing sufficient mutual trust between these parties. Building such trust directly between researchers and resource owners will not scale as the number of experimenters and resource owners grows. The NSF GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation) project has focused on establishing scalable mechanisms for maintaining such trust based on common approaches for authentication, authorization and accountability. Such trust reflects the actual trust relationships and agreements among humans or real-world organizations. We describe here GENI's approaches for federated trust based on mutually trusted authorities, and implemented via cryptographically signed credentials and shared policies.

Logical peering for interdomain networking on testbeds

“…The CNAs delegate subprefixes to owners of edge subnets. • Subnet owners control traffic on their subnets, e.g., they may install the prefix on a testbed slice and/or "opt in" to an edge NSP (an SDX) S by issuing network bypass commands to stitch to S at L2, register S as the local gateway for traffic to selected prefixes, and accept traffic sourced from selected prefixes from S. • Once attached, subnet owners may advertise routes and publish path control policies to S. • Testbed slices have security metadata mirroring the idealized federation governance structure for GENI [16].…”

“…A stitch request from another slice passes the sliceID of the requester. The SliceID can serve as a token for a certificate chain that identifies the slice, including any attributes and a binding to a project group, e.g., following the SAFE instantiation of the GENI trust structure [15], [16]. A hierarchy of testbed federation authorities govern the slices and projects, and assign security attributes to them.…”

A Logical Approach to Cloud Federation

“…A decade ago the research community launched major initiatives to combine network testbeds to leverage benefits of scale, diversity, geographic dispersion, and heterogeneity. NSF GENI [11,14] in the US and FIRE in the EU exemplify this trend. Both initiatives have funded deployment of IaaS federations spanning many sites and providers.…”

Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Based Trust Management in Heterogeneous Federated Future Internet Testbeds

“…Four different scenarios were used to characterize the user's credibility, which was considered based on the reputation score. Brinn et al [23] proposed an approach for federated trust in the context of the GENI project. The concept of trust had three different meanings, named credibility, endorsement and reliance.…”