Securing HPC using Federated Authentication
Abstract
Federated authentication can drastically reduce the overhead of basic account maintenance while simultaneously improving overall system security. Integrating with the user's more frequently used account at their primary organization both provides a better experience to the end user and makes account compromise or changes in affiliation more likely to be noticed and acted upon. Additionally, with many organizations transitioning to multi-factor authentication for all account access, the ability to leverage external federated identity management systems provides the benefit of their efforts without the additional overhead of separately implementing a distinct multi-factor authentication process. This paper describes our experiences and the lessons we learned by enabling federated authentication with the U.S. Government PKI and InCommon Federation, scaling it up to the user base of a production HPC system, and the motivations behind those choices. We have received only positive feedback from our users.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1908.07573,
title = {Securing HPC using Federated Authentication},
author = {Andrew Prout and William Arcand and David Bestor and Bill Bergeron and Chansup Byun and Vijay Gadepally and Michael Houle and Matthew Hubbell and Michael Jones and Anna Klein and Peter Michaleas and Lauren Milechin and Julie Mullen and Antonio Rosa and Siddharth Samsi and Charles Yee and Albert Reuther and Jeremy Kepner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07573},
year = {2021}
}