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 authentication 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