Specifically, the document focuses on the standard triad of enterprise security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Compared to traditional deployments that assign applications and data to dedicated servers, grid farms provide far more flexible deployment enabling organizations to gain greater utilization of their compute resources.
However, the fact that the resources are shared introduces added challenges when it comes to protecting the confidentiality of database records; the integrity of business transactions, requestors, and resources; and the availability of mission-critical functions.
The EGA was formed in 2004 as an advisory group to develop guidelines for adapting grids for everyday enterprise use, as opposed to the high-performance number crunching of earlier grid efforts.
Comprised of 29 organizations that are mostly vendors, major participants include HP, Sun, Oracle, NEC, Intel, and Novell. IBM and Microsoft have not joined the group.
In May 2005, the group released a reference model containing definitions of the major components of an enterprise grid. This document describes security requirements.
According to Lee Cooper, chairman of the alliance whose day job is director of security program management at Oracle, enforcing these protections means securing, not only the servers, but all the components that bind a grid farm together such as communications channels and provisioning software.
Although the environment is shared, you must still support secure isolation between different applications, he said.
Additionally, because the body of users for a grid is far broader than that for a dedicated server or server cluster, management of trust relationships grows far more complicated. And, if a grid resource is reused, he said, all the data from the previous session must be expunged to prevent confidentiality leaks.
Starting with defining what a grid component is, the document describes a reference model spanning the full life cycle from provisioning through ongoing management, retirement, and re-purposing, and describes the security events relevant to each phase.
The heart of the document describes the kinds of threats to which enterprise grids are vulnerable, and outlines the requirements for protecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability in each use case.
For instance, the document stipulates that each element of a grid farm carries a unique identifier, and that every grid component has ability to authenticate themselves to one another.
And it describes security requirements that are unique to the life cycle of grid components including secure packaging of grid components so they are unique and isolated from all others.
Additionally, messages for updating components must be similarly secured, provisioning information should be archived to preserve audit trails, and reuse include steps to wipe components clean before they reenter production.
According to Cooper, EGA’s goal is not to make standards, but to promote development of best practices and relevant standards from bodies such as Oasis, DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), Global Grid Forum and others. The document is available for download from the alliance’s website.
