Optimising Security Configurations with Service Level Agreements

Security and data integrity are important aspects in the fields of Grid and cluster computing. However, security usually incurs a certain amount of performance degradation and adds usage complexity to a field of computing where performance is crucial and usage complexity is already high. The growing popularity of Grid computing is leading to vastly different security requirements. While some Grid security mechanisms are already configurable, many others such as firewalls and advanced sandboxing techniques are usually configured statically per site according to particular user community needs. In this paper, we present a WS-Agreement approach for a fine grained security configuration mechanism to allow an optimization of application performance based on specific security requirements. The approach is demonstrated using an industrial optimization application from the area of metal casting.