Identifying Secure Mobile Grid Use Cases - Cloud, Grid and High Performance Computing: Emerging Applications - page 188

management, key management, and so
forth.
• Firewall traversal . A major barrier to
dynamic, cross-domain Grid comput-
ing today is the existence of firewalls. As
noted above, firewalls provide limited
value within a dynamic Grid environment.
However, it is also the case that firewalls
are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
• Anonymity . Anonymity is the state of being
not identifiable within a set of principles
(Pitzmann & Köhntopp, 2001). Preserving
anonymity is of greater concern in mobile
systems for several reasons. Mobile sys-
tems yield more easily to eavesdropping
and tapping, compared to fixed networks,
making it easier to tap into communication
channels and obtain user information.
• Mobility . Because mobile devices come
with many capabilities, mobile applica-
tions must run on a wide variety of de-
vices, including the devices embedded in
various environments and devices carried
by users. Applications must also support
varying levels of network connectivity.
• Self-organization . The wireless networks
topology must be adapted in case of node
or system compromise and failure. If a ma-
licious node discloses the network topol-
ogy, routing establishment paths may be
affected as well.

some of the threats and risks based on the unique
characteristics of an enterprise Grid:

• Access control attacks : defines risks with
unauthorized entities, as well as authorized
entities, bypassing or defeating access con-
trol policy.
• Mobile colluding attackers : adversaries
having different levels of attacking ability
can collaborate through separate channels
to combine their knowledge and to coordi-
nate their attacking activities. This realizes
the strongest power at the adversary side.
• Defeating Grid auditing and accounting
systems : includes threats to the integrity of
auditing and accounting systems unique to
an enterprise Grid environment. This may
include false event injection, overflow,
event modification, and a variety of other
common attacks against auditing systems.
• Denial of Service (DoS) : this describes an
attack on service or resource availability.
As an enterprise Grid is often expected to
provide a better availability compared to a
non-Grid environment, the following DoS
threats must be considered as part of a risk
assessment:
◦ DoS attack against the Grid compo-

nent join protocol to prevent new au-
thorized Grid components/users from
successfully joining.

◦ Authorized Grid component or user is

“forced” to leave the grid. All these security requirements must be identi-

fied and analyzed in the analysis activity of our
development process from the mobile grid security
use cases defined in this activity and that we will
explain further on.

◦ User or service attempts to flood the

Grid with excessive workload which
may cause compute, network and/or
storage components to become ex-
hausted, or the latency to access those
resources significantly impacts other
Grid users.

Defining Attacks on Mobile
Grid Environments

◦ Altering scheduling (or other Quality

of Service) priorities that have been
defined for Grid components to un-

According to (Enterprise Grid Alliance Security
Working Group, 2005), the following include