Supporting Secure Ad-hoc User Collaboration in Grid Environments

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.