an Intensive Overview

One function of the Grid is to support collaborative science projects on the internet. While some projects may be able to operate with little or no security provided by the infrastructure, major projects have significant security requirements. Shared data or data in transit may be highly sensitive and will almost certainly need guarantees that it hasn’t been tampered with or seen by unauthorised persons. The security may be provided by the application itself, but more usually it will be provided by the infrastructure. This paper provides an introduction to some of the security issues that arise in collaborative distributed computing and some of the technology solutions that have been developed to meet these requirements. We motivate our examination of these web service and internet technologies through a few simple usage scenarios that have emerged within Grid Computing. In this initial technology overview, prepared within OMII as part of the ongoing debate we are having in respect of interoperability of grid infrastructures, we largely restrict ourselves to authentication and authorisation. Background Security on the internet is provided by the judicious use of cryptography. This technology can be applied at the transport layer or at the message level. Currently, using Transport Layer Security (TLS) such a