Security for mobile grid systems

Grid computing technology is used as inexpensive systems to gather and utilize computational capability. This technology enhances applications services by arranging machines and distributed resources in a single huge computational entity. A Grid is a system that has the ability to organize resources which are not under the subject of centralized domain, utilize protocols and interfaces, and supply high quality of service. The Grid should have the ability to enhance not only the systems performance and job throughput of the applications participated but also increase the utilization scale of resources by employing effective resource management methods to the huge amount of its resources. Grid mobility appears as a technology to facilitate the accomplishment of requirements for Grid jobs as well as Grid users. This idea depends on migrating or relocating jobs, data and application software among Grid nodes. However, making use of mobility technology leads to data confidentiality problems within the Grid. Data confidentiality is the protection of data from intruders’ attacks. The data confidentiality can be addressed by limiting the mobility to trusted parts of the Grid, but this solution leads to the notion of Virtual Organizations (VOs). Also as a result of mobility technology the need for a tool to organize and enforce policies while applying the mobility has been increased. To date, not enough attention has been paid to policies that deal with data movements within the Grid. Most existing Grid systems have support only limited types of policies (e.g. CPU resources). A few designs consider enforcing data policies in their architecture. Therefore, we propose a policy-managed Grid environment that addresses these issues (user-submitted policy, data policy, and multiple VOs). In this research, a new policy management tool has been introduced to solve the mobility limitation and data confidentiality especially in the case of mobile sharing and data movements within the Grid. We present a dynamic and heterogeneous policy management framework that can give a clear policy definition about the ability to move jobs, data and application software from nodes to nodes during jobs’ execution in the Grid environment. This framework supports a multi-organization environment with different domains, supports the external Grid user preferences along with enforces policies for data movements and the mobility feature within different domains. The results of our research have been evaluated using Jade simulator, which is a software framework fully implemented in Java language and allows agents to execute tasks defined according to the agent policy. The simulation results have verified that the research aims enhance the security and performance in the Grid environments. They also show enhanced control over data and services distribution and usage and present practical evidence in the form of scenario test-bed data as to the effectiveness of our architecture.