Identity federation in cloud computing

Both cloud and GRID are computing paradigms for the large-scale management of distributed resources. Even if the first is usually oriented to transaction-based applications, and the latter to High Performance Computation, there is a lot of interest in their integration. This is typically obtained through the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud model, which is exploited in the GRID context to offer machine with full administration rights to users. In this paper the focus is on the security problems linked to the integration of cloud and GRID computing. It is proposed the adoption of identify federation between different security domains to manage the relationship between the user machines and the standard GRID infrastructure. This solution is experimented within PerfCloud, a cloud implementation that exploits an underlying GRID platform.