Methods and mechanisms of security in Grid Computing

A number of methods and mechanisms are used to safe data in distributed and cluster computing or homogenous kind of environment where we don´t have much challenges for security. In contrast heterogeneous systems require proper attention has to be given on security of the data due to increasing need of computing, data sharing and interacting with other resources make the systems more vulnerable. Grid Computing is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains for a common goal. In Grid Computing, the resources are having their own protocol and scheduling policy and that provides huge opportunities of resource sharing, resource utilization and virtualization. The necessary security measures are in terms of authentication, authorization, resource protection, secure communication, data confidentiality, data integrity, policy management and network security. In this paper, we focused on the various issues related with the security in grid environment and discuss the solutions for them. In our approach, the security methods are proposed at various levels like resource level, service level, authentication level, information level and management level along with the consideration of load factor.