Overhead Verification for Cryptographically Secured Transmission on the Grid

It is well known that the network protocols frequently used in Internet and Local Area Networks do not ensure the security level required for current distributed applications. This is even more crucial for the Grid environment. Therefore asymmetric cryptography algorithms have been applied in order to secure information transmitted over the network. The security level enforced by means of the algorithms is found sufficient, however it introduces additional transmission overhead. In this paper we describe experiments performed in order to evaluate transmission efficiency depending on the security level applied

Towards Monitoring Security Policies in Grid Computing: a Survey

Grid computing systems are complex and dynamic environments and therefore require appropriate automated management, which would enable stable and reliable operation of the whole grid environment. The research community has addressed this requirement with a number of monitoring frameworks, which serve to collect data at various levels to support decision taking and management activities within grids. However, these existing solutions seem to implement little support for collecting security-related data and enforcing appropriate security policies and constraints in this respect. With an increasing role of network connections and users remotely accessing computational resources from various locations, grid systems are no longer seen as localised and isolated ecosystems, but are coming to be more open and distributed. In this light, it is becoming more and more important to enable monitoring framework with capabilities to collect security-related data and check whether these observations comply with certain security constraints. Accordingly, in this paper we present a survey of existing grid monitoring systems with a goal to identify an existing gap of insufficient support for handling the security dimension in grids. Our survey suggests that available grid monitoring frameworks are incapable of collecting security-related data metrics and evaluating them against a set of security policies. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we outline several groups of security policies, which we envisage to be further incorporated in our own research work, and by the wider community

Towards Monitoring Security Aspects in Mobile Grid Computing Systems: a Survey

— In recent years, the proliferation of mobile devices has led to the emergence of mobile grid computing, that is extending the reach of grid computing by enabling mobile devices both to contribute to and utilise grid resources. Thus, the pool of available computational and storage resources can be significantly enriched by leveraging idle capacities of mobile devices. Nevertheless, the emergence of the mobile grid gives rise to challenges, which have not hitherto been addressed thoroughly. Among those is the security threat, which arises from the multitude of mobile devices accessing grid resources and associated network connections, spanning across the globe. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it surveys prominent grid monitoring systems and attempts to identify any potential limitations with respect to the security aspect. The results of the survey indicate that existing solutions fail to address the security concerns, which arises from enabling the mobile devices interacting with the grid. To this end the second aim of the paper is to propose a monitoring system which continuously tracks the geo-location of the mobile devices accessing the grid and thereby ascertains that the location-based security policies are not violated