Authentication & Trust Federation (ATF)

The Authentication and Trust Fabrics (ATF)

The ATF group promotes services, technology, and policy that support interoperable, high quality identity for DOE-funded scientific research programs. ATF helps DOE sites integrate existing authentication and authorization technology wherever possible. Federation is accomplished by following appropriate policy requirements and standards in order to build the trust necessary for federation to work. Federation requires use of standardized protocols, operated in a secure manner. ATF helps organize these federation activities, providing the initial guidance and support. When needed, ATF provides foundational services for federations. ATF organizes community working groups to deal with identity-related issues. ATF members participate in various industry activities and forums related to evolving identity standards. Current ATF projects include:

Science Identity Federation (SIF)

SIF is an effort organized in partnership with several DOE laboratories to make interoperable identity services available to all DOE laboratories, and make identities interoperable with the rest of the US academic and research community.  To that end, SIF is acting as a sub-federation of InCommon.  SIF is currently focused on enrolling as many  DOE laboratories as possible in InCommon, and helping each of them set up their identity provider services in the InCommon federation. In the future, SIF will be working with DOE user facilities and developers in order to provide a basic set of interesting services to the federation.

DOEGrids Certificate Authority

DOEGrids CA is part of the ESnet PKI hierarchy, and supports DOE projects that use Grid technology for the most part.  DOEGrids CA issues identity credentials – in the form of X.509 certificates – to people and to servers. DOEGrids is an important resource for OSG, TeraGrid, ESG, fusion, and other DOE-supported science. DOEGrids CA is transitioning from a single site to a multi-master, geographically distributed infrastructure in 2011. Additional services offered:

IGTF related websites:

ATF hosts IGTF’s igtf.net and gridpma.org domains and websites, and provides substantial services for TAGPMA. IGTF and TAGPMA are federations of CA operators supporting Grid service providers across the planet. TAGPMA is the western hemisphere component of IGTF.

Object Identifier (OID) Registry  This is a register of Object Identifiers. OIDs are used to identify protocol and schema objects in several different technical areas, including X.500/LDAP-based directories, and X.509-based public-key infrastructure.

PGP Key Service Public Key Infrastructure is a set of public key services around the world that allows PGP users to issue keys and publicly sign each other's keys to foster a network of trust. ATF offers the service to do this.