An empirical study on secure communication for grid information service

Grid Information Service (GIS) is an entity that gathers the latest information about the grid resources. These resources information are then retrieved by the grid users or brokers prior to planning task deployment in a grid environment. Hence, the GIS frequently communicate with the resources for their latest status, and hardware and software specifications. This creates the need for timely and secure communication mechanisms between GIS and the resources. In this paper, an empirical study is conducted to evaluate the performance of Identity-based authenticated Key Exchange (IDKEX) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocols for secure communications between GIS and grid resources. From the observation, ID-KEX protocol shows better performance in terms of time and space consumptions which appear to be more efficient in the presence of large number of resources.