Globus Security Infrastructure
The Globus Security Infrastructure is part of a larger project, the Globus Toolkit. The goal of the Globus Toolkit is to develop services that enable grid computing, also known as High Performance Computing (HPC) or compute clusters . Globus includes services to locate people and resources on the network, as well as submit and control compute jobs running on machines in the network. In order to perform its tasks securely, however, it needed a secure authentication and privacy mechanism. The Globus Security Infrastructure, or GSI, is the Globus Toolkit’s implementation of a secure authentication system.
While the GSI operates under different principles than Kerberos, most notably through its use of public key encryption and infrastructure, it provides the same single-sign-on user experience that Kerberos does. In addition, the developers of Globus recognized the need for interoperability with existing Kerberos installations, so the Globus team has developed several tools that allow interoperability between Kerberos tickets and Globus certificates.
More information is available about the Globus Toolkit at http://www.globus.org/.
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