Challenging Grid Security Services

Tuesday 22 April 2008

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is expected to start producing real data later this year. The data will be sent from CERN to 11 Tier 1 computing centres of the World LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) which will store the data and pass it out to Tier 2 centres in their countries for analysis by particle physics researchers.

The Tier1 centre in the UK is operated by STFC e-Science at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (link opens in a new window). In the prospect of real data distribution, the WLCG undertook its second Security Service Challenge which was conducted in the UK by Dr Mingchao Ma, the UK Grid Security Officer between January and March this year.

The test evaluated whether the UK sites were correctly logging activity on their sites, and were able to report in time to a security alert which required them to analyse those logs for suspect activity. Mingchao thought this was a good test of the people side of the Grid "here we were looking not only at what the logs recorded but also at the site's administrator's ability to read them and pull out only the information required". Once this was assessed the actual answer was looked at to see if the site had performed the tasks the job had been sent to do.

While the overall result was a positive one with such a complex and distributed system there were, of course, some problems at certain sites. In the end, however, it all goes to help build up the system in preparation for full data taking. Dr Dave Kelsey, the UK particle physics grid (GridPP (link opens in a new window)) security coordinator, was glad that problems were found now and not later "important lessons were learned; logfiles must be kept safe and secure, system administrators should be familiar with the various logging systems on their cluster and middleware developers should be coding so that these logs are consistent and contain meaningful information."