Both a service requester and a service provider must be allowed to define and enforce privacy policies, for instance taking into account personally identifiable information or purpose of invocation. (Privacy policies may be treated as an aspect of authorization policy addressing privacy semantics such as information usage rather than plain information access.)

Confidentiality.

The confidentiality of the underlying communication (transport) mechanism must be protected, as must the confidentiality of the messages or documents that flow over a given transport mechanism. The confidentiality requirement includes point-to-point transport as well as store-and-forward mechanisms.

Message integrity.

Unauthorized changes made to messages or documents must be detectable by the recipient. The use of message- or document-level integrity checking is determined by policy, which is tied to the offered quality of the service.

Policy exchange.

Service requestors and providers must be allowed to dynamically exchange security (among other) policy information to establish a negotiated security context between them. Such policy information can contain authentication requirements, supported functionality, constraints, privacy rules, and so forth.

Secure logging.

Provisions must be made for security services, facilities for time-stamping, and mechanisms for securely logging any kind of operational information or event. The word securely in this context means reliably and accurately, that is, so that such a collection is neither interruptible nor alterable by adverse agents. Secure logging is the foundation for addressing requirements for notarization, non-repudiation, and auditing.

Assurance.

Means must be provided to qualify the security assurance level expected of a hosting environment. This information may include virus protection, firewall usage for Internet access, and internal virtual private network (VPN) usage (310). Users can consider such information when making a decision about the environment in which to deploy a service.
Manageability. Security management in Grids is needed, for example, in the areas of identity management, policy management, and key management. Security management also includes higher-level requirements such as virus protection and intrusion detection and protection, which are requirements in their own rights but are typically provided as part of security management.

Firewall traversal.

A major barrier to dynamic, cross-domain Grid computing today is the existence of firewalls (179). Although firewalls may provide only limited value within a dynamic Grid environment, they are unlikely to disappear soon. Thus, a Grid security model must take them into account and provide mechanisms for cleanly traversing them—without compromising local control of firewall policy.

As Grid computing continues to evolve to support e-business applications in commercial settings, the requirements and functions discussed in this section will form the foundation for standards-based interoperability not only between real organizations within a VO (intra-VO) but also across organizations belonging in different VOs (inter-VO). On this foundation, applications and infrastructure can be built to establish the trust relationships required for commercial distributed computing, enterprise application integration, and business-to-business partner collaboration over the Internet.

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Security for Virtual Organizations: Federating Trust and Policy Domains

Privacy.