The Community Authorization Service: Status and Future

Virtual organizations (VOs) are communities of resource providers and users distributed over multiple policy domains. These VOs often wish to define and enforce consistent policies in addition to the policies of their underlying domains. This is challenging, not only because of the problems in distributing the policy to the domains, but also because of the fact that those domains may each have different capabilities for enforcing the policy. The Community Authorization Service (CAS) solves this problem by allowing resource providers to delegate some policy authority to the VO while maintaining ultimate control over their resources. In this paper we describe CAS and our past and current implementations of CAS, and we discuss our plans for CAS-related research.