Performance comparison of security mechanisms for grid services

Security is one of the most important features for grid services. There are several specifications used to add security to grid services, and some of them have been implemented and are in use. However, since most of the security mechanisms involve slow XML manipulations, adding security to grid services introduces a big performance penalty. In this paper, we introduce various security mechanisms and compare their features and performance. Our evaluation shows that transport level security (SSL) is faster than message level security, and should be used if there is no special requirement to use message level security. For message level security, WS-SecureConversation is generally fast, but has a scalability problem.