Grid technologies support collaborative e-Research typified by multiple institutions and resources seamlessly shared to tackle
common research problems. The rules for collaboration and resource sharing are commonly achieved through establishment and
management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources by collaborators are defined and
enforced by sites involved in the collaboration. The expression and enforcement of these rules is made through access control
systems where roles/privileges are defined and associated with individuals as digitally signed attribute certificates which
collaborating sites then use to authorize access to resources. Key to this approach is that the roles are assigned to the right individuals in the VO; the attribute
certificates are only presented to the appropriate resources in the VO; it is transparent to the end user researchers, and
finally that it is manageable for resource providers and administrators in the collaboration. In this paper, we present a
security model and implementation improving the overall usability and security of resources used in Grid-based e-Research
collaborations through exploitation of the Internet2 Shibboleth technology. This is explored in the context of a major new
security focused project at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow in the nanoCMOS electronics
domain.
Keywords Grid computing - e-Research - Security - Virtual Organizations - Shibboleth