Fine-Grained Continuous Usage Control of Service Based Grids – The GridTrust Approach

Abstract

Access control techniques designed for single domain infrastructures, where users are known by domain administrators, provide considerable liberty in the usage of resources. This paradigm is not suitable for highly scalable and decentralised systems such as Grids and service oriented architectures (SOA), where resources are shared between domains, and users come from remote domains. One approach is to provide policy-driven autonomic solutions that operate a continuous monitoring of the usage of resources by users. This paper presents the services and tools offered by the GridTrust Security Framework (GSF). GSF addresses three layers of the next generation of grid (NGG) architecture: the Grid application layer, the Grid service middleware layer, and the Grid foundation layer. The framework is composed of security and trust services and tools provided at the middleware and Grid foundation middleware layers. Various business case studies are being developed to validate the GridTrust results.

Modelling Fine-Grained Access Control Policies in Grids

“…There exists a number of implementations of the UCON model tailored for Grid systems, e.g. [5,10,6,11]. In [5,10], the authors provide a model of usage control for computational Grids, following Park and Sandhu's UCON abc model [3].…”

“…Related to the above POLPA language and policy enforcement architecture, [15], have proposes a couple of methods for testing any implementation of the architecture based on two strategies; a fault-based to uncover vulnerabilities and problems that may occur during a PDP implementation, and the other is based on conditions coverage with a methodology for simulating the continuous control of the PDP during the runtime execution. In [11], an architecture and implementation were proposed for enforcing UCON policies in a Grid system, based on the Globus Grid middleware 3 [16]. The architecture extended that for POLPA, and the language used was also a simplified version of the POLPA policy language.…”

Security and Trust Management for Virtual Organisations: GridTrust Approach

“…VOs will allow companies to provide and to access Grid resources to achieve common goals. VOs are also valuable in the larger context of Service Oriented Architectures to set up "virtual" markets and to support collaboration between different units of a corporation or between cooperating players in the same market [3].…”