OGC Web Services Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment (OSI)

Chris Higgins, IE Manager, EDINA National Datacentre, Scotland

Webinar,Thursday, Nov 18, 2010

OGC Web Services Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment

Some housekeeping

• Audio separate from webinar. Phone in on:

+1 512 225 3050 Participant Code: 55699#• Please mute if not speaking and in conversation with

colleagues, or in a busy room, etc.• Submit questions via the “chat” pod. Will collate these

and get through as many as possible at the end.• Session is being recorded

Some introductions

• Team that has worked on integrating Shibboleth/OWS: – Self, Andrew Seales, Michael Koutroumpas and Andreas

Matheus• IE Initiating Organisations:

– EDINA, Snowflake and Cadcorp• IE Participants

– EDINA, Snowflake, Cadcorp, Envitia, con terra, JRC– BKG (German NMA) provided another federation

• OGC IE Facilitator:– Luis Bermudez

EDINA • A National Data Centre for Tertiary Education since

1995– based at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland

• Our mission...

to enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching in UK higher and further education

• Focus is on service but also undertake r&D– turn projects services

• In ESDIN one of our roles is to try to represent interests of the European academic sector – one of the identified target user groups

• An eContentplus Best Practice Network project• Started September 2008. Ends March 2011• Coordinated by EuroGeographics

• Key goal: help member states, candidate countries and EFTA States prepare their data for INSPIRE Annex 1 spatial data themes and improve access:

1. Administrative Boundaries2. Cadastral Parcels3. Hydrography4. Transport Networks5. Geographical Names

ESDIN Project

ESDIN project info (www.esdin.eu)

Interactive Instruments

Bundesamt für Kartographie

und Geodäsie

Lantmäteriet

National Technical University of Athens

IGN Belgium

Bundesamt für Eich- und

Vermessungswesen

Universität Münster

EDINA, University Edinburgh

National Agency for Cadastre and

Real Estate Publicity Romania

Helsinki University of Technology

IGN France

Kadaster

Kort & Matrikelstyrelsen

Geodan Software Development & Technology

1Spatial

The Finnish Geodetic Institute

National Land Survey of Finland

Institute of Geodesy,

Cartography and Remote

Sensing

Statens kartverk

EuroGeographics

Why put effort into federated access control?

• Authentication is the process of verifying that claims made concerning a subject, eg, identity, who is attempting to access a resource are true, ie, authentic

• Frequently, SDI content and service providers need to know who is accessing their valuable, secure, protected, data

• The ability for a group of organisations with common objectives, ie, a federation, to securely exchange authentication information is a powerful SDI enabler

• Even more so if removing some of the barriers to interoperability…

Shibboleth

• Internet2 consortium• Open source package for web Single Sign On across admin

boundaries based on standards:– Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)

• Organisations can exchange user information and make security assertions by obeying privacy policies

• Small coordination centre, large federation of organisations (service and identity providers)

• Devolved authentication – maintain and leverage existing user management

• Enables finer grained authorisation through use of attributes • Many Shibboleth Access Management Federations across Globe

SP

SPIdP

IdP

IdP

IdP

SP

SP

SP

SP

SP

SP

SP

SPSP

Coordinating

Centre

Federation Service Providers

Identity Providers

Users

Organisations

IdP

IdP

SP

SP

Why put effort into federated access control round OGC Web Services?

• Requested by the commission to focus on testing practical existing solutions

• Opportunity to build on earlier work undertaken by same team (JISC funded SEE-GEO project)– Showed Shibboleth Access Control around WMS

• Key findings current work; the solution required:– No changes to the OWS interface specifications– No changes to the core mainstream Shibboleth– BUT, does require changes to OWS desktop clients

IdP

IdP

IdP

IdP

INSPIRE Federation OWS Providers

Member State organisations, eg, NMCAs

IdP

IdP

WMS

Key organisations, eg. EEA, JRC

WMS

WMS

WMS

WMS

WMS

WFS

WFS

WFS

WFSWFS

WFS

What we set out to do in this IE

• Provide the OGC community with the opportunity to demonstrate their desktop client software being capable of consuming OWS within Shibboleth Access Management Federations – Protected ESDIN Federation OWS to develop against– Reference implementation of desktop client

• Result: a variety of different clients capable of undergoing the Shibboleth/SAML interactions– Browser based clients, ie OpenLayers based– Desktop based clients

• Result: a better understanding of the issues

OGC Interoperability Experiment

• IEs are part of the OGC Interoperability program, which includes other activities, such as Pilots and Testbeds.

• The IE is focused on an interoperability issue related to the OGC Technical Baseline.

• The IE completion timeframe is reasonable (4-6 months).• The IE is “lightweight” – focuses on a single interoperability issue.• All materials, documents, lessons learned, and other findings

developed as a result of the IE will be shared with the OGC membership.

• The expected results: Engineering Report, Best Practice Report, and Change Requests.

What we intend to do today

• Show these clients in action• But note. Aggressive timeline. The Kickoff telcon was

on Sept 30th, ie, seven weeks ago. • Different clients, some browser based, some desktop,

accessing various WMS and WFS• Series of Single Sign On scenarios

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' menGang aft agley, (Robert Burns)

Example: Desktop Client, WMS

SSO,Desktop Client,WmS

ED

INA

Cadcorp

Envitia

1 Attempt access protected service User not previously authenticated

2 User picks IdP

3 Authenticates

4 Demonstrates access to data

5 Attempts access different protected services within the Federation

Already authenticated

6 Demonstrates access to data

OGC Web Services Shibboleth Interoperability Experiment

Some housekeeping

• Audio separate from webinar. Phone in on:

+1 512 225 3050 Participant Code: 55699#• Please mute if not speaking and in conversation with

colleagues, or in a busy room, etc.• Submit questions via the “chat” pod. Will collate these

and get through as many as possible at the end.• Session is being recorded