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Trust and Security in Virtual Communities

Second Workshop: Usability and Interoperability in AuthN/AuthZ

Oxford, May 8th and 9th 2008

The eSI theme Trust and Security in Virtual Communities is intended to bring together eScience researchers to understand and develop the state of the art in security. A key element in the thinking here is that good security can be an enabler of new patterns of interaction, and not merely an inhibitor.

The theme's first workshop gathered participants from a range of eScience application domains, and as its final report shows, identified a number of unifying topics which represent either existing challenges to be solved or new areas to be explored. Further workshops are being held to address each of these areas.

The first considered approaches to authentication and authorization. It has long been recognized that there are significant usability problems for end-users in existing technologies. Moreover, their interoperation is often a significant challenge for eScience solution architects and developers: this leads to complexity (which is generally bad for security) and also is too often evident to the end user, compounding usability problems. It has been recognized that eScience "pioneers" may be willing to go to considerable lengths (or cut corners) in order to achieve ground-breaking results, but for mass adoption, such heroics are not feasible.

The objective of this workshop was to take a snapshot of work being done in this area, particularly in the UK, to identify and disseminate the most promising solutions and best practice, and to inform and develop proposals for future research. Anyone working in security in eScience and related topics was welcome to attend.

A number of speakers offered their perspective, each followed by a substantial discussion, followed by a plenary discussion to identify common themes and next steps.

Arrangements

The workshop ran in Oxford eResearch Centre, on 8th and 9th May 2008.

Thursday 8th May

See Notes for talk summaries and copies of slides.

10am onwards: arrival and coffee

11am Workshop introduction / Andrew Martin

12noon Richard Sinnott

1pm Lunch

1.45pm Angela Sasse & Philip Inglesant presentation

2.45pm Coffee

3.00pm David Chadwick thumb|presentation

4.00pm Jens Jensen presentation (4.3MiB)

7.30pm Dinner at Cafe Rouge

Friday 9th May

9am Bruce Beckles

10am Panayiotis Periorellis

11am coffee

11.15am Howard Chivers

12.15pm Discussions

1pm Lunch

1.30pm further discussion, and next steps

3pm Finish

Links

The First Workshop wiki pages. The final report of that workshop is available on that page.

A Discussion Paper for the theme is also available, and comments are welcome (by email, or on the wiki).

Notes on this workshop are also available.