2010, Vol.15 No.3, 201-204
Article ID 1007-1202(2010)03-0201-04
DOI 10.1007/s11859-010-0304-8
Trust Asymmetry
in Grid Authentication
□ WANG Haiyan, WANG Ruchuan
Institute of Computer Technology, College of Computer Science
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing
210003, Jiangsu, China
© Wuhan University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
Abstract: To tackle trust asymmetry problem in grid authentica-
tion (GAu), this paper proposes a novel GAu mechanism to help
establish a symmetric trust relationship between resource con-
sumer and resource provider on the grid. To exemplify the design-
ing of the novel GAu mechanism, a prototype is also given with
integration of a trust model. Empirical results demonstrate that the
proposed model can be a potential solution to address trust asym-
metry problem in grid authentication.
Key words: asymmetry; authentication; grid; trust
CLC number: TP 309
Received date: 2009-11-12
Foundation item: Supported by the National High Technology Research and
Development Program of China (863 Program) (2007AA01Z404, 2007AA01Z478),
the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60573141, 60773041) and
the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK2008451)
Biography: WANG Haiyan, female, Associate professor, Ph. D., research
direction: information security. E-mail: wanghy@njupt.edu.cn
0 Introduction
Grid computing systems have attracted the attention
of many academic as well as industrial communities for
the past couple of years due to the unique ability of mar-
shalling collections of heterogeneous computers and re-
sources, enabling easy access to diverse resources and
services in different virtual organizations (VOs) that oth-
erwise could not be possible without a grid model
[1-2]
.
Grid authentication (GAu) is of great significance to grid
security. Early versions of grid computing were initiated
as a way of supporting scientific collaboration, where
many of the participants knew and trusted each other. In
that case, there was an implicit trust relationship between
resource consumer(RC) and resource provider (RP) for
each interaction. GAu between RC and RP was realized
satisfyingly by identification and verification of identi-
ties for both of the collaborating parties, usually in the
form of an identity certificate issued by a certificate au-
thority(CA). However, when grid technology is ex-
ploited to a wider range, e.g., to be used in commercial
or medical scenarios
[3]
, implicit trust relationship be-
tween RC and RP does not exit any longer. It is inevita-
ble for grid principals to share resources with unknown
partners, which involves certain degree of risk since RC
cannot distinguish between high- and low-quality RPs on
the grid. For trust asymmetry problem, RP does not need
to trust RC at all, while RC must depend on the well be-
havior of RP completely, which has hindered the adop-
tion of grid computing to a potential large scale. Unfor-
tunately, current identity-based GAu solutions fail to
solve this trust asymmetry problem on these new grid
applications. It is imperative for GAu model designers to