Introducing secure peergroups in SP2A

Service-oriented grids are aiming at new applications beyond traditional resource-oriented scientific computing. We argue that Community Support is emerging as the real killer application. Service-oriented systems provide a flexible solution for work groups which belong to university campuses, research labs, enterprises, finance environments. We are building the service-oriented P2P architecture (SP²A), which is the result of the positive convergence between grid and peer-to-peer computing. P2P design allows to overcome the limitations of available mechanisms for publishing and discovering grid services, which are essentially based on centralized directories, thus raising robustness, scalability and performance concerns. SP²A is constituted by distinct communities of peers organized for specific purposes. In this paper we illustrate the group security policies of SP²A, which define the mechanisms for peer authentication, peergroup admission control, authorization and transport security. Prototype implementation details are also exposed.