Towards Monitoring Security Policies in Grid Computing: a Survey

Grid computing systems are complex and dynamic environments and therefore require appropriate automated management, which would enable stable and reliable operation of the whole grid environment. The research community has addressed this requirement with a number of monitoring frameworks, which serve to collect data at various levels to support decision taking and management activities within grids. However, these existing solutions seem to implement little support for collecting security-related data and enforcing appropriate security policies and constraints in this respect. With an increasing role of network connections and users remotely accessing computational resources from various locations, grid systems are no longer seen as localised and isolated ecosystems, but are coming to be more open and distributed. In this light, it is becoming more and more important to enable monitoring framework with capabilities to collect security-related data and check whether these observations comply with certain security constraints. Accordingly, in this paper we present a survey of existing grid monitoring systems with a goal to identify an existing gap of insufficient support for handling the security dimension in grids. Our survey suggests that available grid monitoring frameworks are incapable of collecting security-related data metrics and evaluating them against a set of security policies. As a first step towards addressing this issue, we outline several groups of security policies, which we envisage to be further incorporated in our own research work, and by the wider community.