Security in the Development Process of Mobile Grid Systems

Grid computing has emerged to cater the need of computing-on-demand (Jana et al., 2009) due to the advent of distributed computing with sophisticated load balancing, distributed data and concurrent computing power using clustered servers. The Grid enables resource sharing and dynamic allocation of computational resources, thus increasing access to distributed data, promoting operational flexibility and collaboration, and allowing service providers to scale efficiently to meet variable demands (Foster & Kesselman, 2004). Security is considered as the most significant challenge for Grid computing (Humphrey et al., 2005), due to the fact that resources are shared between organizations; expensive resources, that may go from computers and other hardware facilities, to potentially valuable, sensitive and confidential data files. In recent years the mobile computing community has been successful in utilising academic and industry research efforts to bring products to the commercial market. We have seen a proliferation of consumer electronic devices taking advantage of wireless technology enrich our daily lives with increased productivity thanks to higher connectivity. At first glance, it seems that the marriage of mobile wireless consumer devices with highperformance Grid computing would be an unlikely match. After all, Grid computing to date has utilised multiprocessors and PCs as the computing nodes within its mesh. Consumer computing devices such as laptops and PDAs are typically restricted by reduced CPU, memory, secondary storage, and bandwidth capabilities. However, therein lies the challenge. The availability of wirelessly connected mobile devices has grown considerably within recent years, creating an enormous collective untapped potential for resource utilisation. To wit, recent market research shows that in 2008, 269 million mobile phone and 36 million smartphone (Gartner, 2009) were sold worldwide, and that in 2006, 17 million PDAs (Gartner, 2007) were sold worldwide. Although these individual computing devices may be resource-limited in isolation, as an aggregated sum, they have the potential to play a vital role within Grid computing (Phan et al., 2005). On the other hand, the idea of developing software through systematic development processes to improve software quality is not new. Nevertheless, there are still many information systems such as the Grid Computing ones, that are not developed through methodologies adapted to their most differentiating features (Kolonay & Sobolewski, 2004). That is to say, generic development processes are used to develop specific systems without