ABSTRACT
Grid computing represents a significant new paradigm aimed toward harnessing the collective computational power of distributed computing resources. Such an aggregation of computational resources provides tremendous opportunities for enabling support for applications that are highly compute and resource intensive. Besides, the newly emerging service-oriented architecture and the peer-to-peer computing paradigms are naturally being integrated with grid computing to address significant scalability and manageability issues related to the deployment and efficient management of a grid computing infrastructure. At the same time, the security issues for such an emerging grid environment are becoming increasingly complex and hence they pose a significant bottleneck to its successful deployment. In this chapter, we focus on the key issue of access control specification and enforcement for the protection of resources and shared information in a grid, and address the problem of ensuring secure interoperation among independent grid components that may be unknown to each other but have to engage in transient interactions by establishing trust in an ad hoc manner.
