Using Electronic Institutions to Secure Grid Environments

As the technical infrastructure to support Grid environments matures, attention must be focused on integrating such technical infrastructure with technologies to support more dynamic access to services, and ensuring that such access is appropriately monitored and secured. Such capabilities will be key in providing a safe environment that allow the creation of virtual organisations at runtime. This paper addresses this issue by analysing how work from within the field of Electronic Institutions (EIs) can be employed to provide security support for Grid environments, and introduces the notion of a Semantic Firewall (SFW) responsible for mediating interactions with protected services given a set of access policies. An overarching guideline is that such integration should be pragmatic, taking into account the real-life lessons learned whilst developing, deploying and using the GRIA infrastructure for Grid environments.