Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
First Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems — Abstract

Safely Harnessing Wide Area Surrogate Computing or How to Avoid Building the Perfect Platform for Network Attacks

Sachin Goyal and John Carter, School of Computing, University of Utah

Abstract

We are building a wide area surrogate computing platform, called WASCo, that allows users to dynamically locate, allocate, and exploit resources on surrogate computers spread around the Internet. WASCo allows clients to install and run arbitrary code on surrogates. Uses of WASCo include offloading energy-intensive operations from energy-constrained devices, executing bandwidth-intensive queries near a large data source, creating a dynamic resilient overlay network (RON) to route around internet problems, or instantiating a new web server near underserved clients in response to a spike in traffic.

While a surrogate infrastructure like WASCo has a huge number of beneficial uses, the ability to run arbitrary code on surrogates distributed across the internet could make it the perfect platform for spammers, hackers, content thieves, and other nefarious individuals. In this paper, we discuss the network security issues that must be addressed before wide area surrogate systems can be safely deployed and present our solutions. We show how a combination of virtual machine technology for local resource controls, network security implemented at the virtual machine monitor level, and a trust infrastructure can address the key security problems.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 1 Dec. 2004 ch
Technical Program
WORLDS '04 Home
USENIX home