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MyProxy security software celebrates 15th anniversary


The open-source MyProxy credential management software is celebrating its 15-year anniversary this April. Since Jason Novotny and Von Welch developed the first version of the software at NCSA in 2000, more than 60 versions have been released, featuring contributions from developers around the world, including significant contributions from the European DataGrid, University of Virginia, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

MyProxy is part of the Globus Toolkit and is included in Fedora and Debian Linux operating system package repositories. It’s used by many grid projects including CILogon, OSG, and XSEDE.

NCSA’s recent focus has been on developing user-friendly web front ends for MyProxy, such as CILogon. CILogon allows people at more than 100 InCommon-member universities, agencies, and organizations to use their institution’s credentials to access shared cyberinfrastructure resources, such as XSEDE.

NCSA is also a partner in the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) project, which provides a secure environment for software developers, software assurance tool developers, and software assurance researchers to collaborate and improve software assurance activities. MyProxy was one of the first pieces of software to be analyzed in the SWAMP.

“Secure coding has always been a priority for MyProxy, as validated by two independent vulnerability assessments,” said Jim Basney, NCSA Senior Research Scientist and MyProxy project leader.

Development of MyProxy was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation through NCSA, the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research, the NSF Middleware Initiative, the Strategic Technologies for Cyberinfrastructure Program, and the TeraGrid. MyProxy was cited as an “exemplar of success in cyberinfrastructure software sustainability” in the report from the 2010 NSF workshop on CyberInfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability.

The original 2001 paper describing MyProxy (“An Online Credential Repository For The Grid: MyProxy” by Jason Novotny, Steven Tuecke, and Von Welch) was selected as one of the best papers over the past 20 years of the IEEE High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing Conference.

In addition to Novotny and Welch and Basney, the following developers also contributed to MyProxy over the years: Bill Baker, Shiva Shankar Chetan, Patrick Duda, Terry Fleury, Jarek Gawor, Monte Goode, Daniel Kouril, Zhenmin Li, Alexandre Lossent, Neill Miller, Miroslav Ruda, Benjamin Temko, Naotaka Yamamoto, and Venkat Yekkirala.

For more information, including a MyProxy project timeline, visit http://grid.ncsa.illinois.edu/myproxy/15year.

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