An Agent-Enabled Content-Explicit Authorization Model for OGSA-Compliant Grid

Abstract

Traditional methods for authorization within Grid computing have many shortcomings. Firstly, the enrolments of users and services into the server are done manually, which is not adaptable to the dynamic environment where the service providers and service consumers join or leave dynamically. Secondly, the authorization policy language is not expressive enough to represent more complex policies, and can’t resolve the problem of semantic inconsistency between different parties who treat the same policy. This paper takes advantage of characteristics of intelligent agent such as autonomy, proactivity, and sociality, to treat with the authorization issues, including automated registrations and management of agents (service providers and service consumers), autonomous authentication and authorization based on policies, etc. On the other hand, an ontology-based content-explicit policy modeling framework is presented, which resolves the semantic inconsistency problem among different parties.