Security Credential Mapping in Grids

Federating security and trust is one of the most significant architectural requirements in grids. In this regard, one challenging issue is the cross-organizational authentication and identification. Organizations participated in Virtual Organizations (VOs) may use different security infrastructures that implement different authentication and identification protocols. Thus, arises an architectural need to provide a mechanism for a lightweight, rapid and interoperable translation of security credentials from an original format to a format understandable by recipients. In this paper, we describe the development and the implementation of an architecture for credential mapping in grids using off-the-shelf technologies and standard specifications. Our open-source implementation of this architecture provides support for an on-the-fly exchange for different types of security credentials used by diverse grid security infrastructures.