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Federated identity » History » Revision 2

Revision 1 (Tom Clegg, 04/11/2017 07:54 PM) → Revision 2/22 (Tom Clegg, 04/18/2017 06:00 PM)

h1. Federated identity 

 A person should be able to create an account and get a token from a single identity provider, and use that token to access private/protected resources on multiple Arvados clusters. 

 Motivating use cases: 
 * A user on cluster B shares a project with a user on cluster A. 
 * A container running on cluster A reads and writes data on cluster B. 
 * A user logged in to Workbench A can search/view/download/upload collections at cluster B. 

 Configuration examples: 
 * An organization has 5 clusters, but only one of them has user accounts and roles in its database. 
 * An on-premise cluster runs containers that use public data stored in the cloud (without mirroring the data locally). 

 h2. Design sketch 

 Each Arvados client must be able to prove to cluster B that it is authorized by cluster A to act on behalf of a user account which is controlled by cluster A. This must not involve giving enough information to cluster B to act on behalf of the user account: for example, the client cannot simply give cluster B its cluster A token for the purpose of doing a canary query. 

 h2. Protocol ideas 

 "SRP-6a":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protocol 

 "Salted tokens": instead of passing its literal token, the client passes the token UUID and HMAC(token, "bbbbb") when sending a request to cluster B (where "bbbbb" is cluster B's cluster ID / UUID prefix). Cluster B validates the request by passing those two parameters untouched to a "verify request" ("no-op") endpoint at cluster A.