Security of Distributed Data Management

Security is a pervasive concept that cannot be decoupled from any distributed systems design. The constraints imposed by security considerations have a profound impact on the overall design of the services and interfaces of any Grid middleware and infrastructure, especially for data management. In this article we discuss the requirements, architecture and design of the security mechanisms that can be put in place for distributed data management. The advantages and disadvantages of different solutions and deployment models are discussed. We illustrate the discussion using the implementation of the EU funded Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project. We direct our focus on the security aspects of data access, data replication, data location and data consistency and how the security requirements of the applications are being addressed in the EGEE middleware stack gLite.