Addressing credential revocation in grid environments

Credential revocation is a critical problem in grid environments and remains unaddressed in existing grid security solutions. We present our ongoing work in designing a novel grid authentication system, based on Globus GSI, that solves the revocation problem. The focus of this work is to ensure instantaneous revocation of both long-term digital identities of hosts/users and short-lived identities of user proxies. Our system employs mediated RSA (mRSA), adapts Boneh's notion of semitrusted mediators to suit security in virtual organizations and propagates proxy revocation information as in Micali's NOVOMODO system. We envision that our system would additionally provide a configuration-free security model for end users and fine-grained management of user credentials.