Abstract:

Effective grid authentication plays a critical role in grid security, which has been recognized as a key issue in the designing and extension of grid technologies. At present, public key infrastructure (PKI) has been widely applied for grid authentication, and this article proposes a novel grid authentication mechanism, which is based on combined public key (CPK) employing elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The designing structure of the new grid authentication mechanism and its implementation procedure are described in details. Property analysis of the new mechanism is also made in comparison with that of the globus security infrastructure (GSI) authentication, which leads to the conclusion that CPK-based grid authentication, may be applied as an optimized approach towards efficient and effective grid authentication.

Key words:

grid authentication;CPK;security