Towards an Authentication Middleware to Support Ubiquitous Web Access

Robust authentication and authorisation services are key to the development of a secure environment for information Grids where scientists, researchers, and students with different roles and responsibilities from different institutions can access data, applications and/or computational resources distributed in the Internet environment with components administered locally and independently. This Virtual Organisation (VO) collaborative environment requires the tools that can support heterogeneous authentication and authorisation mechanisms and dissimilar local security policies adopted by resource providers administrated by different institutions.