GREDIA

The main objective of the GREDIA project was to develop a reliable Grid application platform with high-level support for the design, implementation and operational deployment of secure Grid business applications. Thus, GREDIA maintained a novel generic Grid middleware required for applications accessing distributed rich media content using diverse type of devices, including mobile phones. The platform was validated in a real case scenario in the media domain enabling the sharing of resources among different actors such as journalists or editors accessing the Grid from different locations and in some cases using their mobile phones.
One of the key objectives of the project was to ensure protection of data and transactions at all levels through a dedicated security framework. The task carried out by NICS was the development of this security framework [1] which mainly concentrated on the development of an authorization module that provided a heterogenous access to the grid resources. The control of the access was based on the roles that the different users of the grid platform have defined for it. This required an effort for the adaptation of the different schemes for roles used by the grid and the companies being part of it. Moreover, the security framework had to be enhanced in order to support other authorization mechanisms, employed also within the grid. Our development allowed the use of the resources owned by the companies, being part of the GREDIA platform, minimizing thus the integration efforts. As well, the aggregation of new services to the grid did not require much work to be done on the authorization side, therefore, new services can be included in a rapidly manner.

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