A computational grid is a large-scale distributed computing environment capable of providing dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational resources so that complicated computation tasks, such as the verification of the Riemann hypothesis, the factorization of large composite numbers, and the break of difficult RSA codes, can be performed in a relatively cheap distributed environment rather than an expensive supercomputer. As different resources in a grid may have different access policies and different security measures, it is usually more difficult to achieve the secure computation in a distributed grid environment than a centralized computing environment. In this paper, we should discuss some security and computation challenges in the grid computing environment, with an emphasis on encryption and authentication via zetaGrid, a grid computing environment for verification of the Riemann hypothesis.
Song Y. Yan, Glyn James, Gongyi Wu