SVOPME: A Scalable Virtual Organization Privilege Management Environment

As more Virtual Organizations (VOs) are joining the Grid, role-based privilege control has become a required feature for maintaining security. Although modern Grid middleware is beginning to develop and deploy services that support role-based authorization, it is not yet standardized. Moreover, there is an information disconnect in existing role-based authorization mechanisms between VO and site authorization control services. This disconnect prevents the automatic propagation of role-based privilege policies from the VOs to the site authorization services. As a consequence, the manual maintenance and administration of VO and grid sites are very costly. This project will develop a Scalable Virtual Organization Privilege Management Environment (SVOPME) for automating the process of managing role-based privileges over the Grid, from VOs to Grid sites. In Phase I, an XML schema for specifying role-based privilege policies will be defined and used to assist documenting and converting policies among VOs and Grid sites. Also, tools and services will be developed to facilitate the automatic propagation of privilege data. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: An integrated and robust privilege management environment like SVOPME would be a key addition in the operation of a Grid computing environment. SVOPME would drastically reduce the cost of managing both the VOs and shared resources, making Grid easier to use and operate.