Trust Establishment: an enabler for dynamic Virtual Organizations

The need for security is particularly acute when highspeed Internet connections are used to combine widespread computational resources into Grids. It is envisioned that in real Grids there will be many usage scenarios where collaborations will take place among small and dynamic working groups. For this to happen, the ability to establish transient collaboration with little or no intervention from resource administrators is a key requirement. Recent research seeks to provide manageable Grid security services for self-regulating, stable communities. This paper revolves around the idea that establishment of Trust plays a key role in enabling an environment for ad-hoc Virtual Organizations to support collaborations that are relatively spontaneous, short-lived, across cross-administrative domains, and involve few individuals.