Negotiation of Multilateral Security Decisions for Grid Computing

Grid computing enables the sharing of heterogeneous resources within virtual organizations. Since entities in virtual organizations are independently administrated, cross-domain management of access control and intrusion protection is critical for grid services. To provide better protection in grid systems, multiple domains collaborate in making security decisions. Unfortunately, the absence of global trust makes coordination of multilateral decisions difficult. In this paper, we introduce the Grid Access Control and Intrusion Protection Architecture that facilitates the collaboration in making security decisions for grid services. In particular, we present a design of Trust-based Security Variable that assists the negotiation of multilateral security decisions according to the level of trust among grid service providers.