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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.
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