The GSI plug-in for gSOAP: Building cross-grid interoperable secure grid services

Increasingly, grid computing is becoming the paradigm of choice for building large-scale complex scientific applications. These applications are characterized as being computationally and/or data intensive, requiring computational power and storage resources well beyond the capability of a single computer. Grid environments provide distributed, geographically spread computing and storage resources made available to scientists belonging to Virtual Organizations; resource sharing is tightly controlled across multiple administrative domains through established service-level agreements. The adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures leads to grid environments characterized by grid services built using Web Services technologies that can be composed as needed to create arbitrarily complex workflows. In this context, security is a key issue that must be taken into account; another concern is interoperability among grids, a fundamental building block to develop grid-aware applications that can benefit from multiple grid environments. We present the CST plug-in for gSOAP, an open source solution to the problem of securing Web Services in grid environments providing full interoperability between grid environments based on the Globus Toolkit and gLITE middleware.