XPOLA – An Extensible Capability-based Authorization Infrastructure for Grids

There is great need for a secure, fine-grained, efficient, and user-friendly authorization infrastructure to protect the services in Grid community. Grid users and administrators still have to deal with authentication and authorization issues in the traditional supercomputer-centric fashion, especially with the host account maintenance and certificate management. This paper proposes a capability-based infrastructure that provides a fine-grained authorization solution to Web service deployments, and also manages to hide complex security issues from regular Grid users. Furthermore, it gives the resource providers and administrators the extensibility, flexibility and convenience to enforce their authorization policies at the resource with minimal efforts.