Securing HPC using Federated Authentication

TL;DR

This paper discusses implementing federated authentication in HPC systems to enhance security, reduce account management overhead, and leverage existing multi-factor authentication efforts, based on real-world experience with U.S. Government PKI and InCommon Federation.

Contribution

It presents practical insights and lessons learned from deploying federated authentication at scale in a production HPC environment, demonstrating its benefits and user acceptance.

Findings

Positive user feedback on federated authentication implementation

Successful integration with U.S. Government PKI and InCommon Federation

Scalability to large HPC user base achieved

Abstract

Federated authentication can drastically reduce the overhead of basic account maintenance while simultaneously improving overall system security. Integrating with the user's more frequently used account at their primary organization both provides a better experience to the end user and makes account compromise or changes in affiliation more likely to be noticed and acted upon. Additionally, with many organizations transitioning to multi-factor authentication for all account access, the ability to leverage external federated identity management systems provides the benefit of their efforts without the additional overhead of separately implementing a distinct multi-factor authentication process. This paper describes our experiences and the lessons we learned by enabling federated authentication with the U.S. Government PKI and InCommon Federation, scaling it up to the user base of a production HPC system, and the motivations behind those choices. We have received only positive feedback from our users.