Our security model follows the authentication concept of the Globus Security Infrastructure (GSI), while using SSL for the communication between the master node and the CA server.
GSI is a standard for Gird security. It provides a single- sign-on process and an authenticated communication by using asymmetric cryptography as the base for its functionality.
As a security standard, GSI adopts several techniques to meet different security requirements.
This includes the authentication mechanisms for all entities in a Grid, integrity of the messages that are sent within a Grid, and delegation of the authority from an entity to another.
A certificate, which contains the identity of users or services, is the key of the GSI authentica- tion approach.
In this work, we use similar certificate for the authentication between the master node and slave nodes of G-Hadoop, where the master node is in charge of the single-sign-on process.
The user needs only provide his user name and password or simply log on to the master node; jobs can then be submitted to the clusters without requesting any other resources.
A secure connection between the master node and slave nodes is established by the security framework using a mechanism that imitates the SSL handshaking phase