Identity Federation for Expert Only Access in a Large Virtual Community: Drug Interactions Use Case
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2008 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | It is unwieldy to provide users in large virtual communities with new credentials, like passwords or certificates, due to distribution costs and users' reluctance to have yet another credentials. This problem can be solved by using identity federation, where users' identities are asserted by their home institutions, in the form of attributes describing a user. This approach can be used for restricting access to selected resources to only users with certain attributes, for example medical experts, and still reach a large community of users. In this paper we present our work and experience gained on a use case, where we created a web site providing information about drug interactions, allowing users to add new information in the Web 2.0 spirit, but only medical experts are allowed to do that to maintain the quality of the provided information. The same method can be used for restricting access to grid resources intended for large expert communities, which is the case for a medical grid. |