A Guanxi Shibboleth based Security Infrastructure

An e-Social Science infrastructure generally has security requirements to protect their restricted resources or services. As a widely accepted authentication and authorization technology, Shibboleth supports the sharing of resources on interinstitutional federation. Guanxi is an open source implementation of the Shibboleth protocol and architecture. In this paper, we propose a security infrastructure for e-social science based on the Guanxi Shibboleth. This security infrastructure presents two main features. Firstly, Guanxi Shibboleth is integrated into the user-friendly Sakai collaborative and learning environment which provides an ideal place for users to access a variety of federation resources in line with the Shibboleth authentication model. Secondly, PERMIS technology is used to enhance the authorization mechanisms thus enabling a policy-driven, role-based, fine-grained access control. As a result, the security infrastructure presents the advantages of Guanxi Shibboleth, PERMIS and Sakai, and it has been applied to e-Social Science application. We believe this security infrastructure provides a promising authentication and authorization solution for e-social science applications as well as applications in other domains.