Fine-Grained Authorization for Job Execution in the Grid: Design and Implementation

TL;DR

This paper presents a design and implementation of fine-grained authorization mechanisms for job execution in grid computing, enabling virtual organizations to enforce specific policies alongside resource owners.

Contribution

It introduces a new policy language and extensions to the Globus Toolkit to support detailed authorization for resource and job management.

Findings

Prototype implementation demonstrates feasibility

Policy language effectively expresses fine-grained policies

Analysis shows improved policy enforcement capabilities

Abstract

In this paper we describe our work on enabling fine-grained authorization for resource usage and management. We address the need of virtual organizations to enforce their own polices in addition to those of the resource owners, in regard to both resource consumption and job management. To implement this design, we propose changes and extensions to the Globus Toolkit's version 2 resource management mechanism. We describe the prototype and the policy language that we designed to express fine-grained policies, and we present an analysis of our solution.