Federated Authentication and Credential Translation in the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure

One of the challenges in a distributed data infrastructure is how users authenticate to the infrastructure, and how their authorisations are tracked. Each user community comes with its own established practices, all different, and users are put off if they need to use new, difficult tools. From the perspective of the infrastructure project, the level of assurance must be high enough, and it should not be necessary to reimplement an authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI). In the EUDAT project, we chose to implement a mostly loosely coupled approach based on the outcome of the Contrail and Unicore projects. We have preferred a practical approach, combining the outcome of several projects who have contributed parts of the puzzle. The present paper aims to describe the experiences with the integration of these parts. Eventually, we aim to have a full framework which will enable us to easily integrate new user communities and new services.