Abstract

This report inrvestigates the issues of securing access to computin,g resources in computation. al grids. Grid en,viron,men.ts are built orb top of platforms that corrtrol access to resources within a sin,gle adenin.istrative domairr, at the g.r-an,ular.ityo f a use,r. In wide-area multi-domain. grid en.viron,men.ts, the overhead of mainiainin,g user accounts is prohibitive, a.rad secu7.in,g access to resources via user accountability is impractical. Typically, these issues are han,dled by inlplenlert,ting checks that guaran,tee the safety of applic~ations, so [hat they can rurt. in shared use^ accour1.t~. This work shows that safety checks - lan,guage-based, compile-time, link-time, load-lime - curren.tly implemen.ted in most grid en.virorrmen.ts are either in,adequute or limit allowed grid users and applicatiorrs. Techn.ique.s without such li7nitations are presen.ted. Shadow accoun,ts allow reu.se of user accounts without administrative overheads, and run-time solution~s - run-time 7non.itorirt.y and virtu.tr1 machines - allow arbilrary code to execute while erilforciny a given resource access policy.

Keywords

security in grid environments, safety of grid applications, access control of shared resources, sharing user accounts, shadow account, run-time application sandboxing, virtual machines.

Date of this Version

September 2001

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