Appendix F. GT 4.1.0 Call for Community Testing: Community Authorization Service (CAS)

1. What is a "Call for Community Testing"?

A Call for Community Testing is a mechanism to notify our users that new Globus code is available for testing in the field. Through these calls, we hope to expose the code to a wide variety of usage scenarios early in its development process. The ultimate goals are to catch bugs that have historically been found only after final releases, and to elicit feedback from the community on ways our software can be improved.

2. Participating in the CAS Testing Call is easy!

  1. Install the software in a non-production environment. Use the 4.1.0 distribution from http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/development/; the code can also be retrieved directly from CVS using the tag globus_4_1_0.
  2. Exercise the software.
  3. Log your experiences in http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/ under the "CAS/SAML utilities" product. Please mention 4.1.0 explicitly in the body of the report.
  4. If you have any questions or comments regarding this component, join the cas-user@globus.org list to participate in discussions with other testers. (To subscribe, read the instructions here.)
  5. Optional: Consider sending descriptions of your tests to cas-dev@globus.org so that we might use them to build standard tests in the future. (To subscribe, read the instructions here.)

3. Testing period

The testing period for this call is [FIXME: date range].

4. About CAS

CAS allows a virtual organization to express policy regarding resources distributed across a number of sites. A CAS server issues assertions to the virtual organization users, granting them fine-grained access rights to resources. Servers recognize and enforce the assertions. CAS is designed to be extensible to multiple services and is currently supported by the GridFTP server.

5. Reasons for testing CAS

  • We need volunteers to exercise CAS to discover performance and scalability problems as well as volunteers to closely inspect CAS from a security perspective. Since CAS serves as a central point for a VO's authorization decisions security and scalability issues are extremely important to discover early.
  • We need volunteers for CAS to discover functionality and usability problems. Improving usability and functionality will make the software easier to use and develop with.

6. Technology dependencies

The CAS service depends on the following GT components:

  • WS Authentication and Authorization
  • Java WS Core

The CAS GridFTP authorization module depends on the following GT components:

  • Pre-WS Authentication and Authorization

The CAS service depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • OpenSAML

The CAS GridFTP authorization module depends on the following 3rd party software:

  • libxml

7. Environment/build parameters and other special conditions to test

  1. Use of various JVMs
  2. Administrative interface for granting/revoking rights
  3. Query interface, specifically assertion generation
  4. Various client tools.

8. For more information

For more information, see the CAS Release Notes.