FESL: Fedora Enhanced Security Layer (A Community-Based Project)

Abstract

While there have been many significant changes to Fedora since the release of Fedora 3.0, there has not been any new work in the area of authentication and authorization. At the same time, there have been many requests from the Fedora user community to support a wider range of authentication methods and to better enable management and enforcement of XACML authorization policies. As a result, members of the Fedora community initiated the FESL project to re-factor and improve the Fedora security architecture. The FESL team has decided to incorporate Muradora's authentication and authorization modules into Fedora. The FESL project team will re-factor the current security implementation of the core Fedora service into a more modular architecture based on Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS). In terms of making XACML easier to use, the FESL team will work towards providing a uniform "vocabulary" for typical authorization use cases. This vocabulary will make XACML policies more easy understood by end users without specific knowledge of Fedora's APIs or the XACML standard. A uniform vocabulary will also aid in the development of a more intuitive UI editor for expressing authorization requirements.