User-Friendly Authentication and Authorisation for Grid Environments

The aim of this project is to develop a usable, lightweight authentication and authorisation framework for the grid middleware and grid environments used by the RealityGrid Project. This security framework will be integrated into the lightweight middleware being developed for the RealityGrid Project.To ensure that the framework actually meets the relevant security requirements, first user-centred design and security methodologies will be used to determine the nature of these requirements. Formal methods will then be used to refine, analyse and model these requirements, culminating in the development of a security model for the framework. Formal analysis and verification of this security model and, finally, of the implemented security framework will then be undertaken.To ensure that the framework is usable and meets the user requirements, a user-centred design methodology is used to elicit the user requirements and then design and develop the framework. This is complemented by ongoing user trials of both software prototypes and the developed software throughout the software development cycle. The results of these trials are fed into the iterative development cycle used to develop the security framework.