Security Services Architecture for Secure Mobile Grid Systems

 Mobile Grid, is a full inheritor of the Grid with the additional feature that it supports mobile users andresources. Security is an important aspect in Grid based systems, and it is more complex to ensure thisin a mobile platform owing to the limitations of resources in these devices. A Grid infrastructure that supportsthe participation of mobile nodes and incorporates security aspects will thus play a significant rolein the development of Grid computing. The idea of developing software through systematic developmentprocesses to improve software quality is not new. However, many information systems such as those ofGrid Computing are still not developed through methodologies which have been adapted to their mostdifferentiating features. The lack of adequate development methods for this kind of systems in whichsecurity is taken into account has encouraged us to build a methodology to develop them, offering adetailed guide for their analysis, design and implementation. It is important to use software V&V techniques,according to IEEE Std. 1012 for Software Verification and Validation, to ensure that a software systemmeets the operational needs of the user. This ensures that the requirements for the system arecorrect, complete, and consistent, and that the life-cycle products correctly design and implement systemrequirements. This paper shows part of a development process that we are elaborating for the constructionof information systems based on Grid Computing, which are highly dependent on mobile devices inwhich security plays a highly important role. In the design activity of the process, we design a securityarchitecture which serves as a reference for any mobile Grid application that we wish to build since thissecurity architecture defines a complete set of security services which will be instantiated depending onthe requirements and features found in previous activities of the process. A V&V task is also defined in thedesign activity to validate and verify both the architecture built and the traceability of the artifacts generatedin this activity. In this paper, we will present the service-oriented security architecture for MobileGrid Systems which considers all possible security services that may be required for any mobile Grid application.