StReD: A quality of security framework for storage resources in Data Grids

Securing storage resources in Grid environments has increasingly become a major concern to make Grids attractive for a wide range of data-intensive applications, because security requirements are often imposed on storage resources to support security-critical applications. However, existing storage systems are unable to dynamically adjust quality of security to meet the flexible security needs of complex data-intensive applications. To remedy this deficiency, we propose in this paper a quality of security framework or StReD for storage resources in Data Grids. In this framework, we integrate quality of security adaptor with an array of security services. Applications running in the framework are enabled to specify flexible security requirements and desired response times of disk requests. The framework leverages the adaptor to dynamically control quality of security for disk requests, thereby achieving good tradeoffs between security and storage system throughput. Experimental results based on a simulated Grid with storage resources show that the proposed framework is capable of significantly improving quality of security and guaranteeing desired response times of disk requests.