Dynamic Layer-2 VPN Services for Improving Security in the Grid Environment

摘要

Pervasive and on-demand computing are now a reality, mainly in the scientific area, and the computational Grid concept is gaining popularity as a scalable way to deliver access to a wide range of distributed computing and data resources. But, as Grids move from an experimental phase to real production and their deployment in the Internet significantly increases, controlling the security of a Grid application becomes imperative. The most significant Grid security issue is that the different sites composing the Grid will generally be managed by different organizations each with their own security mechanisms and policies. This makes any communication security arrangement on the entities participating to the Grid generally more difficult than if they were on the same local area network. In this paper, we show how the security and privacy services offered by scalable on-demand layer-2 MPLS VPN services can be applied in large-scale Grid scenarios and propose a novel network resource abstraction for discovery and setup of on-demand layer-2 Virtual Private Networks. It has been implemented in a Grid Information Service prototype which was successfully tested on a dedicated testbed infrastructure.