Grid security risks identified

The Enterprise Grid Alliance, which includes several top vendors trying to accelerate the use of grid hed its first paper on the unique security requirements of grids.

The 37-page paper aims to help end-users, vendors and standards groups identify the risks associated with enterprise grid computing. Some security requirements described in the paper apply to traditional systems as well, but they simply become more prominent in grid set-ups. For example, a storage system might contain sensitive information that should only be accessible from one application even though several applications link to it. The paper says that grid resources (or simply pools of networked resources) alone are not unique to a grid environment. What is unique is the way in which they are aggregated and managed.

By introducing the Grid Management Entity with the ability to provision, manage and decommission pools of grid resources, one can get to the heart of the unique threats and security requirements of a grid environment. The paper can be downloaded from www.gridalliance.org/en/ index.asp