Virtual Organization Management Across Middleware Boundaries

One of the most important challenges in production grids is to achieve interoperation across several heterogeneous grid middleware platforms: escience applications need a coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals/institutions, independently from whatever middleware the resources are running. For this reason, there is a great effort going on to define standard interfaces, in order to implement common services that can be used to achieve cross-middlewares interoperability. In this paper, we present our modifications to the virtual organization management service (VOMS), a widely-known and used tool that acts as an attribute authority. We enhanced VOMS to expose the standardized interface of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and therefore to release SAML assertions. This way we want VOMS to be available on the larger possible number of grid middleware platforms.