Securing Real-Time On-Line Interactive Applications in edutain@grid

This paper presents the analysis, design and implementation of security facilities within the edutain@grid infrastructure, to support secure hosting of Real-Time On-line Interactive Applications (ROIA). The edutain@grid project aims to develop a novel, sophisticated and service-oriented Grid infrastructure which provides a generic, scalable, reliable and secure service infrastructure for ROIA. The class of applications that comprise ROIA have requirements that present obvious challenges to security infrastructure design and implementation. In particular, the requirement to maintain real-time interactivity, particularly within the virtual world subclass of ROIA, precludes a heavyweight solution for securing ROIA. The edutain@grid project is extending ‘business Grid’ infrastructure that supports Service Level Agreements (SLA) for non-real-time data storage and processing. This infrastructure is based on GRIA and uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Web Services Security to secure web service interactions for the provision of data storage and processing. The edutain@grid project is also developing the Real-Time Framework (RTF), which provides communication and parallelisation functionality and API for application developers to create distributed ROIA that can be deployed to and hosted by instances of edutain@grid. The requirements, analysis, design and implementation of security facilities within RTF and the upper business layers of edutain@grid are presented below. We argue that the security facilities provide a suitable compromise between security and performance that will be attractive to the edutain@grid actors and stake holders.