AN AUTHENTICATION BROKER FOR VIRTUAL LABORATORIES

This document describes a task of the ongoing Virtlab project taking place at the “Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologia” (ULHT), which aims at providing a framework for federated access to modular and configurable virtual network laboratories, based solely on open source technologies. The paper reports on the first implementation of an essential Virtlab concept, the Secure Authentication Broker, which enforces secure authentication and authorization to the virtual resources. This module allows students to access remotely, by means of a seamless e-Learning web interface, various virtual environments (Virtual Machines, Networks and Storage) which are configured according to their academic enrolment profiles. The paper provides a detailed description of the current Authentication Broker architecture and implementation choices, and explains how the mediation mechanism introduced with this module can be further used to enable the adoption of more sophisticated authenticated schema.