“The Globus Toolkit uses the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI)
for enabling secure authentication and communication over an open
network. GSI provides a number of useful services for Grids,
including mutual authentication and single sign-on.“GSI is based on public key encryption, X.509 certificates, and
the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communication protocol. Extensions
to these standards have been added for single sign-on and
delegation. The Globus Toolkit’s implementation of the GSI adheres
to the Generic Security Service API (GSS-API), which is a standard
API for security systems promoted by the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF).“For this article implementation, a guest certificate has been
set up for clients to access Grid resources. The system
administrator of that remote machine can then control access to
those resources. It is assumed that the Java CoG kit has been
installed on the client and a user certificate has been requested
and set up properly. For instructions on obtaining a user’s
certificate for authentication, see the Globus Web site…”
Related Story:
developerWorks: Developing Grid Computing Applications, Part
2(Dec 12, 2002)