Mr Jan Muhammad

PhD Student
National e-Science Centre

 

Room: 246C

Building: Kelvin Building

email: jan@dcs.gla.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)141 330 2958

Fax: +44(0)141 330 8625

 

Biography and Research Interests
I am a PhD research student at the National e-science Centre/Department of Computing Science in the University of Glasgow. I work under the supervision of Prof. Richard O. Sinnott and Dr. Karen V Renaud in the area of integrated security of autonomous and heterogeneous grid environments incorporating service level security and importantly, the underlying security of the fabric upon which these services exist.

The goal of my research is to define and implement a generic fine-grained grid security model for the Grid community which can integrate a range of configuration management tools to support improved security models. This might be for virtual organization (VO) specific patch management or anti-virus software updates for example. This is a challenging problem due to the open and collaborative nature of Grid systems.

Furthermore, the static nature of most current fabric configuration approaches means that applications are often restricted to running on a single environment whose fabrics are carefully configured (by hand) to meet the requirements of the particular application. Until now, security models either address integration of existing grids with agreed trust or use explicit trust models, or they are based on resource allocation functions of Grid fabrics. What is required are integrated tools that allow for VO-specific Grids and fabric management to be seamlessly and transparently established and subsequently managed. This will be one of the key areas of my research, where I will explore the extent that integrated tools for Grid and fabric security management can support the dynamic nature of Grids and the impact this has on the associated overall security.