Experiences of Using the GGF SAML AuthZ Interface

The BRIDGES project has been funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry to develop a Grid infrastructure suitable for the research activities involved in the Wellcome Trust funded Cardiovascular Functional Genomics (CFG) project. The CFG project is investigating possible genetic causes of hypertension. Key requirements on this infrastructure are to link various distributed biomedical data sources together; to transparently address the different security requirements associated with those data resources, and develop tools for analysing and exploring those data sets. In this paper we discuss the security solutions that the BRIDGES team is pursuing through the first practical exploration of Global Grid Forum Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) AuthZ interface to an authorisation infrastructure (PERMIS) using Globus Toolkit version 3 technology.