Towards secure information sharing and management in grid environments

The introduction of service-oriented paradigm in Grid and corresponding Web Services standards has recently demanded the evolution of access control solutions to support fine-grained authorization requirements and dynamic natures derived from Grid environments. In this paper, we present a role-based authorization infrastructure for data sharing and management services in Grid. Our infrastructure advocates a dynamic and flexible resource-centric authorization approach with features of distributed role-based access control and systematic delegation of administrative authority. The infrastructure seamlessly integrates the existing XACML-based policy framework and authorization services in the RAMARS framework. We discuss our proof-of-concept prototype system that supports Web Services and SAML based authorization assertions. We also describe how the framework can be deployed in being compatible with an Open Grid Service Architecture.