Information Systems Security Research Group (ISSRG)

Key Aims

The ISSRG's mission is to research and develop leading edge user friendly security solutions for distributed systems. The group has many years of experience of research in Public Key Infrastructures and Privilege Management Infrastructures, having participated in many EC and UK projects since the late 90s.

The ISSRG are the authors of PERMIS, a fully functional open source authorisation (or privilege management) infrastructure written in Java, which is distributed world wide as part of the US National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative (NMI). PERMIS is fully integrated with the Globus toolkit to provide authorisation for Grid applications using the industry standard SOAP/SAML protocol. It is also integrated with Shibboleth from the Internet 2 consortium, which is being developed to provide single sign on and authorisation for web based resources throughout academia and elsewhere.

We have successfully run several conferences.

Areas of Research Activity

Research grants associated with members of this group are available in detail and summary form. Members are engaged in the following areas of research (research areas in more detail) .

Public Key and Privilege Management Infrastructures
Policy based security
Privacy and Security
User Friendly Security

Trust management and metrics and Reputation Systems
Security and Risk Management
Autonomic Security
Continuous Auditing

Some suggestions of possible postgraduate research projects are also available.

Current Project Links

PERMIS - PERMIS provides users with software to make access control decisions, and also gives them tools for managing policies, role assignments, and delegations between users. (http://sec.cs.kent.ac.uk/permis)

OpenPERMIS - The OpenPERMIS website hosts the open source code that is used to construct the PERMIS release packages. (http://www.openpermis.com)

Logins For Life - The Logins for Life project is a join venture between the ISSRG and the University's IS department, addressing the needs of a University to engage with users throughout their lives. (http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/loginsforlife/index.html)

TAS3 - The TAS³ Integrated Project (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) aims to have a European- wide impact on services based upon personal information, which is typically generated over a human lifetime and therefore is collected & stored at distributed locations and used in a multitude of business processes. (http://www.tas3.eu)