Secure construction of virtual organizations in grid computing systems

Virtual organization (VO) is an important abstraction for designing large-scale distributed applications involving extensive resource-sharing. Existing works on VO mostly assumes that the VO already exists or is created by mechanisms outside of their system model. The VO construction is challenging and critical due to its dynamic and distributed nature. This paper presents a VO Construction Model and an implementation algorithm which is based on a threshold approach and is secure and robust in that events such as member admission, member revocation, VO splitting and merging etc. can be handled without centralized administration. Also authentication and communications among VO members are efficient and without tedious key exchanges and management usually needed in VO built upon the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI).