A security architecture for computational grids
CCS '98 Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
The grid
Grid Economy Comes of Age: Emerging Gridbus Tools for Service-Oriented Cluster and Grid Computing
P2P '02 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing
An Economy-based Accounting Infrastructure for the DataGrid
GRID '03 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Grid Computing
An Efficient, Secure and Delegable Micro-Payment System
EEE '04 Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service (EEE'04)
Grid Resources for Industrial Applications
ICWS '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services
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Although originally fostering the principle of free resource sharing, academia has identified the need for charging mechanisms for grid services offered in order to better control resource usage. Within the IT industry on the other hand, numerous initiatives are aiming at creating commercial grid services. Both need payment systems but most of the available solutions are bespoke. We present a certificate based payment solution that requires no modification of existing middleware APIs. This transparency guarantees seamless operation with deployed, non-payment aware grid infrastructures and enables hence the simultaneous and interchangeable use of free and paid for grid services. GridBank, the central component in our prototype implementation, both issues and redeems digitally signed cheques. The only common nominator being certificate based authentication allows GridBank to be integrated not only to grid middleware but also to any software infrastructure leveraging X.509 certificates for authentication. We compare our solution to other existing payment solutions for grids, describe its detailed architecture and conclude by analysing its features, strengths and weaknesses.