Designing Workflows for Grid Enabled Internet Instruments

To analyse malicious activity on the Internet, instruments such as network telescopes and honeypots are effective tools that can be deployed. Such tools can be deployed in large scale using Grid computing. Manual deployment of instruments wastes resources because common tasks and solutions are reinvented by different deployers and the resulting architectures are often not interoperable or sufficiently scalable. Research is underway to develop a framework for scalable and automated deployment, with Grid technologies providing a promising basis. The integration of Grid technology with instrumentation has two inititiatives. These are CIMA and GRIDCC, with GRIDCC being available as open source. A key area is workflow within the framework, for which BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is used in GRIDCC and considered for initial use for Grid Enabled Internet Instruments. We have found BPEL has limitations when implementing such as framework, particularly in the areas of concurrency and statefullness. We propose implementation independent workflows and identify extensions to BPEL in order to realise them. We believe that BPEL with modification can be used to implement a framework for Internet instruments-Grid computing integration.