Grid computing is concerned with the sharing and coordinated use of diverse
resources in distributed "virtual organizations." The dynamic and
multi-institutional nature of these environments introduces challenging
security issues that demand new technical approaches. In particular, one must
deal with diverse local mechanisms, support dynamic creation of services, and
enable dynamic creation of trust domains. We describe how these issues are
addressed in two generations of the Globus Toolkit. First, we review the Globus
Toolkit version 2 (GT2) approach; then, we describe new approaches developed to
support the Globus Toolkit version 3 (GT3) implementation of the Open Grid
Services Architecture, an initiative that is recasting Grid concepts within a
service oriented framework based on Web services. GT3's security implementation
uses Web services security mechanisms for credential exchange and other
purposes, and introduces a tight least-privilege model that avoids the need for
any privileged network service.Comment: 10 pages; 4 figure
