Deployment-based security for grid applications

Abstract

Increasing complexity of distributed applications and commodity of resources through grids are making harder the task of deploying those applications. There is a clear need for a versatile deployment of distributed applications. In the same time, a security architecture must be able to cope with large variations in application deployment: from intra-domain to multiple domains, going over private, to virtually-private, to public networks. As a consequence, the security should not be tied up in the application code, but rather easily configurable in a flexible and abstract manner. To cope with those issues, we propose a high-level and declarative security framework for object-oriented Grid applications. This article presents the transparent deployment-based security we have developed. In a rather abstract manner, it allows one to set security policies on various security entities (domain, runtime, nodes, objects) in a way that is compatible with security needs according to a given deployment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.