Taking a Fresh Perspective on Middleware for Resource Sharing

Secure distribution of resources has grown increasingly complex. As a result, developers add layers to existing middleware to force existing technologies to solve problems they were not designed to solve. This paper looks at the actual requirements behind grid building to help improve the next generation of middleware. Our goal is to create transparent, secure, scalable access to resources. The resource owner should not have to be concerned with remote user, and should have a simple method for introducing resources to the infrastructure, while strictly enforcing federation, regional, enterprise, local, and device level policies. This should be transparent to the user, who should be able to sign on once and make the desired set of user attributes available to all resources required during the session.