News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren B. Kallens" <>]

NSF MIDDLEWARE INITIATIVE RELEASE 6.0 FEATURES FIRST INTRODUCTION TO
PRIVILEGE AND GROUP MANAGEMENT TOOLS FOR IDENTITY MANAGEMENT INFRASTRUCTURES

Leading-edge development work addresses the administration of identity
information for authorizing access to restricted resources. 

December 14, 2004 -- The sixth release of the National Science Foundation
Middleware Initiative (NMI) - NMI-R6 - offers several new components
relating to end-user authorization services.  Architected to integrate with
academic and research software and infrastructures such as Grids, the
release is available under open-source licenses to the public at
http://www.nsf-middleware.org. New and updated components in NMI-R6 include
standards-based intra- and inter-institutional authentication and
authorization components, frameworks, and related directory schema. Designed
to address specific challenges in research and education security
infrastructures, the release includes a rich variety of tools that enable
researchers to work more efficiently.

The NMI-R6 release features NMI-EDIT's Signet: An Introduction, a set of
privilege management tools based on the Stanford Authority System in use
since 2001, Signet allows the delegated management of resource access
privilege information that can then be provisioned to applications or
directories. Also included in the release is Grouper, a set of group
management tools that integrates with Signet or can be used independently. 

The GRIDS Center is pleased to announce a new resource to help make sense of
the complicated and ever growing landscape of Grid technologies. The new
Grid Ecosystem provides a mix of high level discussion on architecture and
main subsystems, and drills down into technical detail and reference
pointers for individual software packages. Also new from the GRIDS team is a
pilot community collaboration server. 

In September 2001, the first NMI systems integrator teams began work along
with a number of smaller targeted awards.  After six releases of software,
tools, and practices, NMI is at the leading edge of the growing
"cyberinfrastructure" established to support the next generation science and
engineering.

For the full release, refer to: 
http://collab.nsf-middleware.org/Lists/NMIR6/announce.aspx.


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GRIDS Center:  http://www.grids-center.org 
NMI-EDIT Consortium:  http://www.nmi-edit.org 
OGCE Team:  http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/index.jsp


Media Contacts:
Ann West (906-487-1726, 
)
NMI-EDIT