Implementing Data Security in Grid Environment

The technological trend and the advent of worldwide networks, such as the Internet, made distributed elaboration systems more and more powerful, increasing both the computing and the storage capabilities. In Grid computing infrastructures, the data storage subsystem is physically distributed among several nodes and logically shared among several users. This highlights the necessity of a) availability for authorized users only, b)confidentiality, and c) integrity of information and data: in one term security. In this work, we face the problem of data security in Grid, by proposing a lightweight cryptography algorithm combining the strong and highly secure asymmetric cryptography technique (RSA) with the symmetric cryptography (AES). The proposed algorithm has been implemented into a software tool, we named Grid Secure Storage System (GS³), running on top of the Grid File Access Library (GFAL) of the gLite middleware, in order to provide a file system service with cryptography capability and POSIX interface. The choice of implementing GS³ as a file system allows to protect also the file system structure, and moreover to overcome the well-known problem of file rewriting in gLite/GFAL environments.