Hi Nina, All,
  Following Nina's scenario, I have the following question: How do we
answer the same question for authorization. What if a computational
pipeline breaks because of insufficient priviledges, i.e. the services
A,B,C are to be invoked one after the other and the user (identified by
its token) has access only to the (time consuming) services A and B...?

   I also have a proposal about token expiration (quick but not dirty).
Now the token has two states: Active and Inactive. We can introduce a
third state called Stale, where the token will continue to be valid but
the end user will be told that this is inactive. Let me explain this. A
user acquires a token T1 which it active for t1 hours. The user can use
it to perform an action within the next t1/2 hours. After this time the
token will expire but only for the end user (services can continue using
this token!), so if T1 participates in some computational process it
will not really expire. Even if the user posts the token 1sec before its
(pseudo)expiration, the token will be valid for the services :-)

Best regards,
Pantelis

On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 10:04 +0300, Nina Jeliazkova wrote:
> Tobias Girschick wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 20:47 +0300, Nina Jeliazkova wrote: 
> >   
> >> chung wrote:
> >>     
> >>> I don't know if there is some more uniform way of doing so, but a
> >>> quick-and-dirty solution to the user quota problem is to let the
> >>> services decide if the user has exceeded its quota. So when the user
> >>> provides a token id to the service shall:
> >>>
> >>> 1. Ask the SSO server if the token is valid and
> >>> 2. If the user is authorized to perform the action and
> >>> 3. Retrieve the 'id' of the user. Then count the total number of the
> >>> resources generated (on this server) by this user and decide if the user
> >>> is allowed to generate one more resource.
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> Who decides on the threshold, and how / if the user can request to
> >> modify it?
> >>     
> > I would say the people/person maintaining the server the respective
> > service is hosted on. Only those people can judge hard drive space
> > limitations of their service. In case of a quota for max. parallel jobs
> > per user (something we were discussing some time ago, I think) also the
> > maintainers of the server can judge best what the machine can manage and
> > what not.
> >
> >   
> OK, my question is related to the following scenario :
> 
> There is a chained processing (descriptors, models, dataset creation)
> and the processing fails in the middle of the chain, because of quota
> restrictions as above.
> 
> How one would resolve the issue, in order to succeed when retrying the
> calculations?
> 
> Regards,
> Nina
> >>> What I mean by user 'id' is some UUID generated to uniquely identify a
> >>> user since the name of the user might change, so this 'id' will be
> >>> something more "static" (Of course the user will not have to know this
> >>> id).
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> user id + identifier of an OpenSSO server might be safer.  ( one can
> >> easily have setup with more than one OpenSSO server for various reasons)
> >>     
> >>> I think we could go with this workaround. Any opinions on that?
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> As you said, quick-and-dirty solution :)
> >>     
> > I am not sure if it is that dirty, as it somehow adheres to the very
> > distributed character of OpenTox. But still...it's not very
> > sophisticated.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tobias
> >
> >   
> >> Regards,
> >> Nina
> >>     
> >>> Best regards,
> >>> Pantelis
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 19:31 +0300, Luchesar V. ILIEV wrote:
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >>>> I'd say that finding ready-made suitable accounting solution for
> >>>> OpenTox is almost impossible. We have seen that even just AA presents
> >>>> significant challenge because of the specifics of our data that need
> >>>> to be protected. So, if we really want to have quotas implemented,
> >>>> that almost certainly means we need to develop the system to handle
> >>>> them.
> >>>>
> >>>> Cheers,
> >>>> Luchesar
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 14:31, Andreas Maunz <andreas at maunz.de> wrote:
> >>>>     
> >>>>         
> >>>>> Nina Jeliazkova wrote on 06/15/2010 01:19 PM:
> >>>>>       
> >>>>>           
> >>>>>>>>> 3. Every user should be allowed to make use of a pre-specified fraction
> >>>>>>>>> of the server's storage capacity which simply means that there should
> >>>>>>>>> be
> >>>>>>>>> an upper bound on the number of models a user can create (say 50000 or
> >>>>>>>>> something like that). How can such a constraint be established using
> >>>>>>>>> policies?
> >>>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>>               
> >>>>>>>>>                   
> >>>>>>>> Quota support is something we had not yet discussed, but it is indeed
> >>>>>>>> important.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>>             
> >>>>>>>>                 
> >>>>>>> Is there some perspective of accomplishing this kind of authorization
> >>>>>>> using SSO or web services should take that on?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>           
> >>>>>>>               
> >>>>>> This is actually accounting, not authorisation, and we hadn't considered
> >>>>>> it at all.   I am slightly in favour of separating accounting from
> >>>>>> services.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Andreas, what do you think?  Does OpenSSO provide a solution for AAA ?
> >>>>>>         
> >>>>>>             
> >>>>> No, I don't think it does. OpenSSO is originally designed to have a single
> >>>>> administrator for managing policies and not for different users creating
> >>>>> their individual policy (although this is in the pipeline of development at
> >>>>> the moment). Therefore, the aspect of controlling the number of policies has
> >>>>> been neglected.
> >>>>> Other aspects of accounting (e.g. failed attempts to authenticate) are
> >>>>> explicitly covered by a special logging service, but I don't think quota is.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Regards
> >>>>> Andreas
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> Development mailing list
> >>>>> Development at opentox.org
> >>>>> http://www.opentox.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> >>>>>
> >>>>>       
> >>>>>           
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> Development mailing list
> >>>> Development at opentox.org
> >>>> http://www.opentox.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> >>>>     
> >>>>         
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Development mailing list
> >>> Development at opentox.org
> >>> http://www.opentox.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> >>>   
> >>>       
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Development mailing list
> >> Development at opentox.org
> >> http://www.opentox.org/mailman/listinfo/development
> >>     
> >
> >   
> 
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