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

Grid Security Policy Monitoring System (GridSPMS): Towards Monitoring the Security Dimension in Grids

Grid computing systems are complex and dynamic environments requiring appropriate automated management mechanisms, which would enable stable and reliable operation of the whole grid ecosystem. Moreover, the recent novel concept of mobile grid computing – a combination of grid systems with mobile devices – also requires new ways of monitoring the emerging security aspects, associated with the ever-increasing role of network connections in mobile grids. Existing grid monitoring systems, albeit suitable for traditional, localised grid systems, seem to be ignoring the security dimension and do not offer appropriate support for enforcing security policies within a distributed grid system enhanced with mobile devices. Accordingly, in this paper we present the Grid Security Policy Monitoring System (GridSPMS) – a novel grid monitoring framework, which extends the traditional support for data monitoring (i.e., tools, protocols, etc.) with mechanisms for collecting run-time data within grids, focussing on the security dimension. By doing so, GridSPMS aims at monitoring the activity within a grid system and detect situations, where security policies have been potentially violated and, therefore, appropriate response actions have to be taken in this respect. Accordingly, GridSPMS has the potential to address security threats existing in the domain of mobile grid computing, and enable grid administrators with support for timely detection of and response to security-related incidents