Supporting Secure Ad-hoc User Collaboration in Grid Environments
Markus Lorch5
and Dennis Kafura5 
| (5) |
Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech Blacksburg, 24061, VA, USA |
Abstract
We envision that many grid usage scenarios will be based on small, dynamic working groups for which the ability to establish
transient collaboration is a key requirement. Current grid security mechanisms support individual users as members of well-defined
virtual organizations. Recent research seeks to provide manageable grid security services for self-regulating, stable communities.
Our prior work with component-based systems for grid computation demonstrated a need to support spontaneous, limited, short-lived
collaborations which rely on shared or delegated fine grained access privileges. Our mechanisms enable the high-level management
of such fine grained privileges based on PKIX attribute certificates and enforce resulting access policies through readily
available POSIX operating system extensions. In combination, our mechanisms leverage other work in the grid computing and
security communities, reduce administrative costs to resource providers, enable ad-hoc collaboration through incremental trust
relationships and can be used to provide improved security service to long-lived communities.
This research is funded by the Virginia Commonwealth Information Security Center (CISC)
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