Joint Policy Management and Auditing in Virtual Organizations

A major problem facing organizations using grid-computingmodels is the reluctance to participate in multi-organizationalcollaborative environments due to securityconcerns, such as unauthorized access, and fair resourceusage. The Joint control of Virtual Organizations (JoVO)framework enables organizations to form a unified VO, withjointly agreed, knowable and enforceable security policies.The JoVO framework is based on the fault and intrusiontolerant joint control of identity, attributes, and access controlpolicy through the use of threshold-based certificationauthorities. We propose a set of agents, the Credential ManagementAgent and Identity and Authorization Agent to aidgrid services when operating in a multi-domain environment.One of the key areas of concern in grid computingis the assurance of all parties involved that security policiesare appropriate and will be enforced. We propose anautomated distributed audit agent framework consisting ofwhite-box and black-box service testing for joint validationof access control policy.