Computational grids (Computer systems)

Cloud Computing is a new computing model consists of a large pool of hardware
and software resources on remote datacenters that are accessed through the Internet.
Cloud Computing faces significant obstacles to its acceptance, such as security,
virtualization, and lack of standardization. For Cloud standards, there is a long debate
about their role, and more demands for Cloud standards are put on the table. The Cloud
standardization landscape is so ambiguous. To model and analyze security standards for
Cloud Computing and web services, we have surveyed Cloud standards focusing more on
the standards for security, and we classified them by groups of interests. Cloud
Computing leverages a number of technologies such as: Web 2.0, virtualization, and
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA uses web services to facilitate the creation of
SOA systems by adopting different technologies despite their differences in formats and
protocols. Several committees such as W3C and OASIS are developing standards for web services; their standards are rather complex and verbose. We have expressed web services security standards as patterns to make it easy for designers and users to understand their key points. We have written two patterns for two web services standards; WS-Secure Conversation, and WS-Federation. This completed an earlier work we have done on web services standards. We showed relationships between web services security standards and used them to solve major Cloud security issues, such as, authorization and access control, trust, and identity management. Close to web services, we investigated Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and we addressed security considerations in BPEL and how to enforce them. To see how Cloud vendors look at web services standards, we took Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a case-study. By reviewing AWS documentations, web services security standards are barely mentioned. We highlighted some areas where web services security standards could solve some AWS limitations, and improve AWS security process. Finally, we studied the security guidance of two major Cloud-developing organizations, CSA and NIST. Both missed the quality of attributes offered by web services security standards. We expanded their work and added benefits of adopting web services security standards in securing the Cloud.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are characterized by direct access between peer computers, rather than through a centralized server. File sharing is the dominant P2P application on the Internet, allowing users to easily contribute, search and obtain content. The objective of this thesis was to design XYZ, a partially centralized, scalable and self-organizing lookup service for wide area P2P systems. The XYZ system is based on distributed hash table (DHT). A unique ID and a color assigned to each node and each file. The author uses clustering method to create the system backbone by connecting the cluster heads together and uses color clustering method to create color overlays. Any lookup for a file with a color will only be forwarded in the color overlay with the same color so that the searching space is minimized. Simulations and analysis are also provided in this thesis.

Web services have become increasingly important over the past decades. Versatility and platform independence are just some of their advantages. On the other hand, grid computing enables the efficient distribution of computing resources. Together, they provide a great source of computing power that can be particularly leveraged by mobile devices. Mobile computing enables information creation, processing, storage and communication without location constraints [63], not only improving business' operational efficiency [63] but actually changing a way of life. However, the convenience of anytime and anywhere communication is counterbalanced by small screens, limited computing power and battery life. Despite these limitations, mobile devices can extend grid functionality by bringing to the mix not only mobile access but sensing capabilities as well, gathering information from their surroundings through built in mechanisms, such as microphone, camera, GPS and even accelerometers. Prior work has already demonstrated the possibility of enabling Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) access to grid resources from mobile device clients in the WSRF-ME project [39], where a representative Nokia S60 Smartphone application was created on a framework, which extends the JSR-172 functionality to achieve WSRF compliance. In light of today's mobile phone market diversity, this thesis extends the solution proposed by WSRF-ME to non-Java ME phones and to Android devices in particular. Android-based device numbers have grown considerably over the past couple of years despite its recent creation and reduced availability of mature software tools.

Web services intend to provide an application integration technology that can be successfully used over the Internet in a secure, interoperable and trusted manner. Policies are high-level guidelines defining the way an institution conducts its activities. The WS-Policy standard describes how to apply policies of security definition, enforcement of access control, authentication and logging. WS-Trust defines a security token service and a trust engine which are used by web services to authenticate other web services. Using the functions defined in WS-Trust, applications can engage in secure communication after establishing trust. BPEL is a language for web service composition that intends to provide convenient and effective means for application integration over the Internet. We address security considerations in BPEL and how to enforce them, as well as its interactions with other web services standards such as WS-Security and WS-Policy.

The increasing availability of Web services and grid computing has made easier the access and reuse of different types of services. Web services provide network accessible interfaces to application functionality in a platform-independent manner. Developments in grid computing have led to the efficient distribution of computing resources and power through the use of stateful web services. At the same time, mobile devices as a platform of computing have become a ubiquitous, inexpensive, and powerful computing resource. Concepts such as cloud computing has pushed the trend towards using grid concepts in the internet domain and are ideally suited for internet-supported mobile devices. Currently, there are a few complete implementations that leverage mobile devices as a member of a grid or virtual organization. This thesis presents a framework that enables the use of mobile devices to access stateful Web services on a Globus-based grid. To illustrate the presented framework, a user-friendly mobile application has been created that utilizes the framework libraries do to demonstrate the various functionalities that are accessible from any mobile device that supports Java ME.