An Empirical Study of Security Issues in Grid Middleware

Abstract

With the passing of each day, Grid computing and Cloud computing are becoming an important integral part of various applications. More and more software professionals and corporate are focusing on these high performance computing mechanisms. These mechanisms are tremendously evolving as users are also continuously striving for smarter applications and solutions. And as these mechanisms are evolving, their development environment, architecture, middleware and security aspects are also evolving. Security is now became an area of concern for all business applications. The information security issues are there all over the field of Grid computing. One of the keys to survive new and emerging threats is by providing policy based access and context sensitive access to the users. Businesses should ensure that they only give the right access to the right people and they should get the information on who is on their network and what they are doing. This paper discusses and reviews various properties, characteristics, and challenges of the security middleware approaches available. The review reveals that many options of security in middleware are available but there are still many issues and challenges yet to be solved. The information provided in this paper can be used by those organizations which needs proper security mechanism in distributed communication so that a strong security model can be devised further. This paper also puts a challenge to us to devise proper security policies for such communication protocols.