Role-Based Access Control Architecture in Grid Environments

Grid technologies enable large-scale sharing of resources within formal or informal consortia of individuals and/or institutions: what are sometimes called virtual organizations. In these settings, the discovery, characterization, and monitoring of resources, services, and computations can be challenging due to the considerable diversity ,large numbers, dynamic behavior, and geographical distribution of the entities in which a user might be interested. Authorization and access control; the significant aspects of security, have attracted increased attention in grid computing. In authorization an essential part to protect the information and all other resources from unauthorized access by controlling the access via a particular system. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a fairly novel access control technique that provides a centralized, dynamic, and consistent authorization management specifically for the requirements of a particular industry to improve its security. RBAC was developed in the Globus toolkit(GT). Access control is formed by the support of Community Authorization Service (CAS) and this CAS was used and developed in many problems grid research. The major problem with the CAS is that the user credentials are revealed to the virtual organization (VO).In this paper, analyzes the unique security requirements grid computing and develops a security policy and a corresponding security architecture. We also evaluate the performance of Role Based access control architecture.