Flexible and extendable mechanism enabling secure access to e-infrastructures and storage of confidential data for the GridSpace2 virtual laboratory

Abstract

This paper describes the security framework used by the GridSpace2 platform. The framework needs to restrict access to the Experiment Workbench to authorized users only as well as enable scientists to use multiple resources - computers (such as clusters, grids and clouds) and data, like e.g. relational database management systems (RDBMSes). The paper analyzes the appropriate technologies, details the proposed solution and summarizes the results of our research and development of flexible and extensible security solutions for scientists who need transparent access to heterogeneous compute and data resources. Additionally, as part of this paper, a wallet mechanism is described which enables secure storage of arbitrary confidential data such as credentials for external services. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.