Management of security policies in virtual organisations

Grid-based virtual organisations facilitate the sharing of computational resources among users belonging to different organisations and working towards a computationally-intensive goal within some project. The selection, access, usage and release of such resources is usually controlled through the enforcement of security policies that express what is acceptable behaviour by the resources and their users at each stage. This process is complex to manage in large-scale Grid-based systems, therefore, a solution tackling the management of VO policies is desirable. In this paper, we propose one such solution that provides policy management capabilities at each phase of the VO lifecycle. We discuss full aspects of the solution starting from the context and requirements analysis, use cases, design, implementation and finally, qualitative and quantitative evaluation.