August 2024: JSON Web Tokens for Science: Hands on Jupyter Notebook Tutorial

NSF cyberinfrastructure is undergoing a security transformation: a migration from X.509 user certificates to IETF-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). This migration has facilitated a re-thinking of authentication and authorization among cyberinfrastructure providers: enabling federated authentication as a core capability, improving support for attribute, role, and capability-based authorization, and reducing reliance on prior identity-based authorization methods that created security and usability problems. In this webinar, members of the SciAuth project (https://sciauth.org/ - NSF award #2114989) will provide a short, hands-on tutorial for cyberinfrastructure professionals to learn about JWTs, including SciTokens (https://scitokens.org/ - NSF award #1738962). Participants will use Jupyter Notebooks to validate the security of JWTs and experiment with JWT-based authentication and authorization. Participants will gain an understanding of JWT basics suitable for understanding their security and troubleshooting any problems with their use.

Speaker Bios: 

Dr. Jim Basney is a principal research scientist in the cybersecurity group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director and PI of Trusted CI. Jim received his PhD in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Derek Weitzel is a research assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He has been providing distributed computing solutions to the national cyberinfrastructures since 2009. He is a member of the OSG’s production operations team and leads the operations of the National Research Platform. His current areas of research involve distributed data management for shared and opportunistic storage, secure credential management, and network monitoring and analytics.