Authorization Management for Inter-Grids
(K. W. Ng)

It is common for an organization to share computing and data resources within its local internet. Grid computing breaks the boundary by interconnecting resources on different inter-networks over the Internet on a large scale. This dynamic collection of users and resources is called a Virtual Organization (VO). In a VO, the resources follow a coherent resource sharing mechanism and authorization system to share their resources to one another. An authorization system includes definition of authorization policies, authorization decision making, and decision enforcement. Authorization management is a combination of authorization policy management and access-control decision processing. Nowadays, numerous authorization infrastructures have been put forward to enforce security policies within a VO. This project aims to further break down the boundary of resource sharing. The objective is to enable resource sharing between VOs which use different authorization infrastructures, that is, authorization management for an Inter-Grid environment. This is the first step toward the ultimate goal of sharing resources among all VOs in the Internet. In this project we plan to set up an environment for investigation into authorization management for Inter-Grids.