TAP/UWS authentication - short survey

[matthias egger]

Hi DAL/Grid List Members,

in the course of (beta-) testing our TAP service with TOPCAT we again
came across the topic of authentication and SSO.

we need to protect our web services with a user-login, while TOPCAT's
TAP interface currently does not support this.

we wonder know, what is the best practice there in the context of ivoa,
tap/uws?


so i'd like to start a short discussion/survey about whether some of you
have similar requirements and esp. which  - if any - authentication
system you are currently using, and possibly whether you also use
distributed (web-) SSO protocols like SAML2 or openID.

in short:

* do you run a TAP service which requires authentication

* if yes: which authentication method/system do you use:

  * (HTTP) BASIC

  * FORM-Based

  * X.509 Certificates

  * SAML2

  * OpenID

  * other: ?


background is that we need to put security on top of our
web-applications (also considering frameworks like openID and
SAML2/Shibboleth) and would like to hear what is most common and
recommend in ivoa,
also whether it is worth implementing (most common web-) authentication
support in client tools e.g. TOPCAT.


any feedback is every welcome.

thanks and regards! matthias



-- 
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Matthias Egger
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
web:    www.mpa-garching.mpg.de
email:	megger at mpa-garching.mpg.de
fon:	+49-89-30000-2040
fax:    +49-89-30000-2235
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