Policies and security aspects for distributed scientific laboratories

Abstract

Web Services and the Grid allow distributed research teams to form dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations sharing high performance computing resources, large scale data sets and instruments for solving computationally intensive scientific applications, thereby forming Virtual Laboratories. This paper aims at exploring security issues of such distributed scientific laboratories and tries to extend security mechanisms by defining a general approach in which a security policy is used both to provide and regulate access to scientific services. In particular, we consider how security policies specified in XACML and WS-Policy can support the requirements of secure data and resource sharing in a scientific experiment. A framework is given where security policies are stated by the different participants in the experiment, providing a Policy Management system. A prototype implementation of the proposed framework is presented. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.