Trust management for grid systems

Grid computing is a paradigm for distributed computation on shared resources. It uses a large-scale, highly decentralized infrastructure, in which a huge number of participants share heterogeneous resources for a given purpose. Each participant both provides their own resources and exploits others’ resources, combining them to solve their own problems. Trust management is a major issue in the shared Grid environment because Grid participants are usually unknown to each other and usually belong to separate administrative domains, with little or no common trust in the security of opposite infrastructures. The standard security support provided by the most common Grid middleware may be regarded as one means through which such common trust may be established. However, such security solutions are insufficient to exhaustively address all the trust requirements of Grid environments. In this chapter, the authors survey proposals for enhancing trust management in Grid systems.