Semantic Security in Service Oriented Environments

As the technical infrastructure to support Grid environments matures, attention must be focused on integrating such technical infrastructure with technologies to support more dynamic access to services, and ensuring that such access is appropriately monitored and secured. Current approaches for securing organisations thorugh conventional firewalls are insufficient; access is either enabled or disabled for a given port, whereas access to Grid services may be conditional on dynamic factors. This paper reports on the Semantic Firewall (SFW) project, which investigated a policy-based security mechanism responsible for mediating interactions with protected services given a set of dynamic access policies, which define the conditions in which access may be granted to services. The aims of the project are presented, and results and contributions described.