Web Services Security and Load Balancing in Grid Environment

Web services security has some crucial problems to be solved in building Grid applications. In particular the current implementations of message-level Web services security are very slow and therefore extremely vulnerable to even the simplest types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The more advanced is the security mechanisms, the worse the performance and scalability of the whole system. On the other hand, the marriage of Web services and Grid computing promises enormous computing resources for scientific and commercial Grid applications. The complexity of Web services security has come to the point that the processing steps can be broken into functional components that are distributed over the computational Grids. In this paper we introduce such an infrastructure that parcels out the message-level Web services security processing to load balanced computational Grid nodes. We designed it for scalability, dynamic configurability as well as DoS attack miti-