Trust, Security, and Contract Management Challenges for Grid-Based Application Service Provision

The GRASP project aims to provide an OGSA compliant infrastructure to allow Application Service Providers to exploit Grid concepts and infrastructure. Orchestration of grid service instances running “somewhere on the Grid” to deliver a service raises a number of trust, security and contract management challenges, especially in a business context. This paper describes the issues relating to SLA negotiation and management and to the trust and security of dynamically created, distributed virtual organizations, based on the experiences of developing the GRASP architecture and implementing an initial prototype infrastructure.