Speaker
Description
The migration away from using X.509 towards token-based authentication within the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) infrastructure has required many redesigns of the various workflows, ranging from data management through to job submission, and various activities in between. To compound the complexity of this transition, different user groups within WLCG have adopted different token use strategies within their workflows, resulting in a varied Token landscape across the grid.
Within such a diverse environment it is important to engage in a comprehensive and structured risk assessment process to identify potential risk vectors, their mitigations, and quantify their impact. This is crucial to be able to find and prioritise potential issues before they occur, to build and maintain an operationally secure Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure.
The Token Trust and Traceability (TTT) Working group has been engaging in such risk assessment activities to identify, quantify and understand the threats inherent to the use of tokens within our distributed computing infrastructures. Given the different use cases of the various WLCG user groups and experiment communities, it became evident that threat considerations needed to be partitioned by workflow methodology, which formed the framework for our process.
We detail how the TTT constructed and performed the token workflow risk analysis, focusing on some of the key conclusions and recommendations that have been identified, and then present our plans to evolve the analysis into an ongoing process to continue to advise best practice for token use over the coming years - both within the WLCG, and to partner organisations and communities.