Security Issues in Virtual Grid Environments

Computational Grids (or simply Grids) enable access to a large number of resources typically including processing, memory, and storage devices. Usually, Grids are used for running very specific applications (most of them related to some kind of scientific hard problem); however, not much attention has been paid to commercial Grid applications. The massive use of such commercial services will depend on fulfilling their special security, usability and quality of service requirements. In this sense, Virtual Private Grid (VPG) provides a way of dynamically create a virtual grid environment with dedicated network resources. In this paper VPG is compared with related work such as the Grid over VPN (GoVPN), the Grid Community (GC) and the Ad-hoc Grid (AG) and the security challenges for VPGs are analyzed.