Computational grids are now mainstream facilities for e-research worldwide. While enterprise grids exist within organizations, national grids have become common, usually consisting of government as well as academic facilities. Such facilities are not uncommonly lenient with blanket policies to allow inbound and outbound grid traffic. This is far from ideal, from a security perspective, but given the dynamic nature of grid use, it is impractical to keep restrictive firewalls and manually keep up with on-demand firewall reconfiguration. Other solutions are necessary, where security is not sacrificed. Apart from first generation solutions that were mostly not sufficiently generic, standardization work is now ongoing, but exclusively aimed at firewall virtualization. We argue for an architectural solution that encompasses firewall virtualization as well as other methods that can be more appropriate in many environments. This paper describes our notion of the missing layer between grid and fabric, which we refer to as the virtual connectivity layer. We have developed two implementations within this layer and discuss how they fit into a complete and well-defined architectural solution.
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