Trust and Security in Virtual Communities

In many scientific disciplines, the models, data and methods have significant commercial value. Scientists in these sectors are often unwilling to exploit the full potential of distributed computing because, despite substantial developments in the area of usable security, there remains a "Trust Gap" between the scientists’ requirements and present technological capabilities. Submitting data or computations to grid resources means trusting that acceptable standards of security will be upheld by every system - and every administrator. This is a barrier to take-up of e-Science technologies in significant sectors such as bioinformatics, drug discovery, industrial engineering and finance: the cost entailed in a breach of confidentiality is simply too great.

Meanwhile, the computer industry has been investing billions of dollars in trusted platform technologies. These capabilities are now becoming widely available in commodity hardware. This Theme aims to connect the detailed technical requirements of scientific application areas to the emerging technologies for improved trust, in order to set an agenda for the next generation of grid security development. While each application has its distinct requirements, they all share a need to enforce security policies which are considerably more far-reaching than anything currently available.

The initial focus will be on pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, and industrial engineering: areas which offer a broad spectrum of requirements, as well as being important in their own right. The goal is to produce a consensus architecture into which members of those communities would be willing to commit their valuable jobs and data, to promote this for standardization, and to achieve sufficient prototype deployment that the ideas become embedded in emerging products and solutions.