Design of a Structured Fine-Grained Access Control Mechanism for Authorizing Grid Resources

The heterogeneous and very dynamic nature of a grid environment demands a very scalable authorization system. This brings out the need for a fast fine-grained access control (FGAC) mechanism for grid resources to accomplish the required scalability. This paper is proposing a new method of storing and manipulating the resource´s security policy in a way that enables authorization systems to avoid redundancy in security policy checking and to more rapidly specify which group of resources the authenticated user is authorized to access. Comparative study is made in a simulated environment. The proposed method can be integrated in the present authorization systems for better performance.