An Overview of the Implementation of CILogon at NICS

Authentication for HPC resources has always been a double edged issue. On one hand, HPC facilities would like users to login as easily as possible, but with the increase and complexity of system exploits, HPC centers would like to protect their systems to the highest degree possible, which often leads to complicated login mechanisms. While solutions like Two Factor authentication are optimal from a system administration view point, user buy in hasn't been as vociferous as one would hope. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of an alternate solution, CILogon, at NICS. We start with a brief overview of CILogon and then delve into the implementation details. We discuss how we incorporated CILogon to enable users to use their campus credentials to login to the NICS user portal, as well as our compute resource Darter. We discuss the issues we faced during implementation and the strategies we implemented to overcome them.