Security Support for Mobile Grid Services Framework

This paper presents the security support for a middleware framework supporting mobile grid services. Mobile grid services, the extension of the original static grid services, are characterized by the ability of moving from nodes to nodes during execution. By combining an existing mobile agent system (JADE) and a generic grid system toolkit (Globus), the mobile grid services framework is constructed. Security is a critical issue when deploying mobile grid services to real-world applications. It protects the computation of the services in potentially hostile environments. The mobile grid services framework is not practical if no security measures are considered. To complement the purposed framework which only has brief description on the security support part, the details of security mechanisms consisting of authentication, authorization, message integrity and confidentiality, agent permission and agent protection will be presented in this paper