Grid Computing Security – Issues, Concerns and Counter-measures

Anirban Chakrabarti

Grid Computing Focus Group,

Software Engineering Technology Labs

Infosys Technologies

Electronics City, Bangalore, Karnataka 560100, India.

Phone: 91- 80- 51173900

E mail: {Anirban_Chakrabarti }@infosys.com

Relevance of the topic

Until recently, application developers could often assume a target environment that was homogeneous, reliable, secure, and centrally managed. However, with the advent of collaborative computing and data sharing, more and more new modes of interaction have evolved resulting in the need and use of distributed resources for large-scale scientific research. Work within this community has led to the development of Grid technologies, which address precisely these problems and which are seeing widespread and successful adoption for scientific and enterprise computing. In grid computing, heterogeneous resources distributed geographically are virtualized as a unified whole. Grid computing, as a result, provides enormous opportunity in terms of resource sharing, maximization of resource utilization and virtualization of resources. Because of its immense potential, not only the scientific community, but also the enterprise IT communities are excited about the prospect of grid computing. However, researchers and developers of grid computing are worried about the possible security issues and implication of wide-spread use of grid computing. Since, grid computing involves running of applications in diverse environments, different types of security issues arise.

Issues in security in the area of grid computing can be broadly classified into System level, architectural, and interoperability issues. System level security issues deal with the problem of running a foreign application in one’s system. The problem of viruses, worms, malicious codes etc. fall under this category. As part of the tutorial, we will look at different techniques to solve system level security issues including sandboxing which is an accepted solution. Architectural security issues deal with the development of a secure infrastructure for the grid system. Secure infrastructure includes encryption, authentication and authorization in a grid based environment. Global Grid Forum (GGF) has proposed a Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) as part of the open source Globus project to deal with architectural security issues. In addition, there are interoperability issues when different entities use the grid for the sharing purposes. For example, consider a grid system which encompasses multiple domains maintained by different companies. In such a case there would be issues related to managing a heterogeneous security infrastructure in terms of different security measures like authentication, authorization etc. Efforts are being undertaken to deal with the authorization of a community in a grid environment like the Community Authorization Service (CAS).

Grid computing is looked upon by many experts as a technology that can potentially change the world, like the Internet did. However, security is one of the impediments in the possible adoption of grid as a full-fledged IT virtualization solution. Therefore, there is a need to generate awareness in the issues of security in grid computing, as they are critical and challenging. The tutorial therefore is not only timely but also deals with an important and critical issue which needs extensive research and development focus in the near future. The tutorial will discuss in detail the different security problems and the solutions available to tackle the problems. Also, the tutorial will brief the audience regarding the limitations of the existing solutions and the future research and development directions that need to be taken in this area.

Tutorial Organization

The goal of the tutorial is to present to the audience the state-of-the-art research and development in grid security. The tutorial will be broadly divided into five modules: (1) Introduction and context setting, (2) System related security issues in grid, (3) Architectural issues in grid security, and (4) Interoperability issues in grid security, (5) An interactive problem solving exercise for architecting secure grid ecology

1. Introduction and context setting

a. Grid Computing in general

b. The vulnerabilities in grid computing

c. Importance of security in grid computing

d. Different security issues – system related, architectural, and interoperability issues

2. System Related Security Issues in grid

a. Problem and some generic solutions

b. Sandboxing solution in detail

3. Architectural Issues in grid security

a. Current status of Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) of Globus

b. Existing problems and possible solutions

4. Interoperability Issues of grid security

a. The problem and generic solution definition

b. Description of Community Authorization Service (CAS) of Globus

c. Description of MyProxy and VCMan credential manager architectures

d. Existing problems and possible future work

Reference Material

The reference material for the tutorial will be taken from the following sources:

· GGF and Globus materials www.globus.org

· Ian Foster and Carl Kasselman, “Grid 2: A Blueprint for a new Computing Infrastructure,” Morgan Kaufman publications, Nov. 2003.

· Recent articles from Journal of Grid Computing, Grid Today, different GGF forums, CCGrid, Grid Workshop, SC, HiPC, International Conference on Security and Privacy, ACM TISSEC, IEEE INFOCOM, ACM SIGCOMM etc.

Intended audience

This is a half-day tutorial intended for both academic and industry audience. The tutorial will expect the audience to have basic understanding of the concepts of security and distributed computing.

Speakers’ Bio

Anirban Chakrabarti completed his PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University in Dec. 2003. Currently he works as a researcher in the area of Grid Computing in Software Engineering Technology Labs (SETLABS) of Infosys Technologies. His current work involves developing a virtualized security, workflow and licensing framework for grid computing. He is also interested in other areas of autonomic computing including QoS management, data grids etc. Before joining Infosys in Feb. 2004, Anirban had been involved in academic research in the fields of networking and security. He has published numerous papers in his area of research. He has also presented a very well-represented tutorial at INFOCOM 2004.

Relevant Publications by the Presenters

· A. Chakrabarti and G. Manimaran, “Internet Infrastructure Security: A Taxonomy,” in IEEE Networks, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 13-21, Nov./Dec. 2002.

· A. Chakrabarti and G. Manimaran, “Reliability Constrained Routing in QoS Networks,” IEEE/ACM Transactions of Networking, June 2005 (To Appear).

· L. D. Alves, K. Mosebach, and A. Chakrabarti, “Management of Credentials in an Inter-domain Grid Scenario,” in Proc. Trusted Internet Workshop (TIW), Dec. 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti, Dheepak R.A., and S. Sengupta, “Integration of Scheduling and Replication in Data Grids,” in Proc. International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), Dec. 2004.

· Dheepak R.A., S. Ali, S. Sengupta, and A. Chakrabarti, “Study of Scheduling Strategies in Dynamic Data grid Environments,” in Proc.International Workshop on Distributed Computing ( IWDC), Dec. 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti and G. Manimaran, “An Efficient Algorithm for Malicious Update Detection & Recovery in Distance Vector Protocol,” in Proc. International Conference on Communications (ICC), May 2003.

List of Tutorials/Talks on similar topics

· A. Chakrabarti, “Security Issues in Grid Computing,” a short tutorial at Advanced Computing and Communications (ADCOM), December 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti and G. Manimaran, “Network Security: Internet Infrastructure and Wireless Networks,” a full-day tutorial at INFOCOM 2004, March 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti, “Reliability Constrained Routing,” invited talk at Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Aug. 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti, “Security Issues in Routing Protocols,” invited talk at HP Labs, Bangalore, Apr. 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti, “Managing Group Dynamics in QoS and Overlay Multicasting,” invited talk at Department of Telematics, University of Madrid at Leganes, Jan. 2004.

· A. Chakrabarti and G. Manimaran, “Internet Infrastructure Security: Challenges and Solutions,” the tutorial was selected for presentation at IEEE ICCCN, 2002, but all the tutorials were cancelled due to poor registration.