An authentication framework for securing guiset infrastructure
Grid computing has appeared as a progressive and substantial area which has gained considerable attention from academic and business environments. It provides large, flexible resource sharing environment where resources and services are distributed over distributed administrative domains. Although there are many corporations benefiting from the grid computing technology, SMMEs still face some difficulties in exploiting these capabilities because of their lack of understanding the benefits that e-commerce enabling technology can provide. GUISET was developed to enable the integration of skills and resources by the SMMEs so that they can share and collaborate between themselves and independent business associates. With GUISET technology based on an open resource sharing paradigm, and provision of unlimited access to end users, comes with a great challenge of security. The widely deployed technology for securing these shared grid resources exploited by end users is the public key infrastructure. It proves the identities of grid users through the use of certificates. GSI is one of the implementations of the PKI technology and delivers essential requirements in a security infrastructure and those include delegation services, mutual authentication and single sign-on. However, the GSI has been discovered to suffer from poor scalability because of the use of certificates. In addressing the above-mentioned challenge, an authentication infrastructure for GUISET has been developed. The model employs the distribution of certification authorities granting identification to users requiring access to GUISET resources. An implementation was performed for evaluating the performance of the proposed model. The results showed that the newly developed authentication framework for securing GUISET resources provides more scalability than the previously developed grid security infrastructure.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations