Privacy and Anonymity Protection in Computational Grid Services

In computational grid computing, grid nodes spanning over several diverse computing resources belonging to heterogeneous administrative domains form the backbone of Virtual Enterprise [VE]. In order to offer service-on-demand, various service providers, requesters, brokers and administrators collaborate in request-response manner among each other in Service Oriented Virtual Enterprise through service registry, service discovery and service binding mechanisms. Security issues for integrated and collaborative sharing of computing resources across heterogeneous administrative domains are principal concern. At the same time, the privacy and anonymity are also of prime importance while communicating over publicly spanned network like web. The individual service providers or requesters may not reveal their true identity to one another for privacy needs. Also, computational grid services may be required to be availed anonymously within the grid framework to keep the personal sensitive information about the service requester protected. This paper focuses on the protection of privacy and anonymity of grid stakeholders in the service oriented computational grid framework. An extension of onion routing has been used with dynamic token exchange along with protection of privacy and anonymity of individual identity.