Authorisation in Grid computing

This paper briefly surveys how authorisation in Grid computing has evolved during the last few years, and presents the latest developments in which Grid applications can utilise a policy controlled authorisation infrastructure to make decisions about which users are allowed to perform which actions on which Grid resources. The paper describes the Global Grid Forum SAML interface for connecting policy based authorisation infrastructures to Grid applications, and then describes the PERMIS authorisation infrastructure which has implemented this interface. The paper concludes with suggestions about how this work will evolve in the future.