Grid Computing Security - An Introduction

Grid computing is widely regarded as a technology of immense potential
in both industry and academia. The evolution pattern of grid technologies
is very similar to the growth and evolution of Internet technologies that
was witnessed in the early 1990s. Similar to the Internet, the initial grid
computing technologies were also developed mostly in the universities and
research labs to solve unique research problems and to collaborate between
different researchers across the globe. Recently, the high computing industries
like finance, life sciences, energy, automobiles, rendering, etc. are
showing a great amount of interest in the potential of connecting standalone
and silo based clusters into a department and sometimes enterprisewide
grid system. Grid computing is currently in the midst of evolving
standards, inheriting and customizing from those developed in the high
performance, distributed, and recently from the Web services community.
Due to the lack of consistent and widely used standards, several enterprises
are concerned about the implementation of an enterprise-level grid system,
though the potential of such a system is well understood. Even when the
enterprises have considered grid as a solution, several issues have made
them reconsider their decisions. Issues related to application engineering,
manageability, data management, licensing, security, etc. have prevented
them from implementing an enterprise-wide grid solution. As a technology,
grid computing has potential beyond the high performance computing
industries due to it's inherent collaboration, autonomic, and utility based
service behavior. To make this evolution possible all the above-mentioned
issues need to be solved. Some of the issues are technical and some of
them have business and economic overtones like the issue related to licensing.
Each of the issues mentioned above is important and deserves a close
look and understanding. In this post we will solely concentrate on the issue
related to grid computing security.
As an issue, security is perhaps the most important and needs close
understanding as grid computing offers unique security challenges. In this
blog we look at different security issues pertaining to the grid system;
some of them are of immediate concern and some are long term issues. We
will also look at security issues in other areas of computer science like
networks and operating systems which may affect the design of future
grids in the upcoming posts.