Evaluating Grid Portal Security Paper, Review

I just finished reading a paper titled Evaluating Grid Portal Security, by David Del Vecchio, Victor Hazelwood and Marty Humphrey. In it they evaluate GridSphere, OGCE and Clarens against a standard set of security metrics. The conclusion is that there is plenty of "room for improvement". I found their recommendation section at the end particularly helpful. It got me to thinking about things we can do in the projects I work with to make grid portals more secure, and here I try to capture my thoughts.

First, I think in the PURSe/PURSe Portlets project, we should provide a way to configure the strength of the password required when a user creates a new registration, and we should provide a secure setting of this by default out of the box. I created a bug report to track this.

Second, I think one of the most difficult challenges for grid portals is in the area of creating, managing and processing auditing logs. But the authors do provide a simple criterion, that all grid credential accesses be written to auditing logs. However, is this sufficient? It would seem that one would need to audit also all grid services requests (e.g., GRAM and GridFTP calls). Then there is the problem of how to audit the auditing logs. Perhaps there are general purpose tools to make this more feasible. Nevertheless, we are seeing in TeraGrid a strong requirement for this functionality, so we need to come up with a solution.

For the LEAD Portal that I work on, this is complicated by the fact that we do not have the user's grid credentials at the portal level, nor do we make calls to grid services from the portal. Ours is a more distributed architecture, with services communicating asynchronously via a publish/subscribe notification broker. So what we need is an auditing notification topic that all LEAD services could write to as a kind of auditing log. A special auditing listener could be set up to listen to this topic and persist the messages to a file or database.