SPIKE

The aim of SPIKE is to build a platform for the rapid set up of short term virtual business alliances that facilitates the exchange of information and cooperation among networked enterprises of all sizes. The solution encompasses a portal as a primary interface to the alliance, a service bus for providing a homogeneous access to the services that are available in the alliance, a semantically enriched service-oriented infrastructure and a security framework to protect all the transactions. The resulting platform will be easy to use, manage and integrate into the existing networked environments.

The creation of a platform with the all the components mentioned above working together represents a challenge from the security point of view. It is in this topic where NICS is focusing their efforts within the project developing a security framework that provides authentication, authorization and single sign-on to web services. A special focus is paid to the integration with the authentication and authorization systems already available (if applies) in each of the companies being part of an alliance.

Among all the open source solutions that could meet the SPIKE security requirements we are implementing a solution based on Shibboleth. Shibboleth allows us for the management of identities from the organizations sides as well as providing authentication and authorization for the platform. The under going development of the security framework of SPIKE is being integrated with the rest of components of the platform, particularly with the SPIKE portal and the SPIKE Service Bus.