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Infrastructural Security for Virtualized Grid Computing
The goal of the grid computing paradigm is to make computer power as easy to access as an electrical power grid. Unlike the power grid, the computer grid uses remote resources located at a service provider. Malicious users can abuse the provided resources, which not only affects their own systems bu...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2011
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| Zusammenfassung: | The goal of the grid computing paradigm is to make computer power as easy to access as an electrical power grid. Unlike the power grid, the computer grid uses remote resources located at a service provider. Malicious users can abuse the provided resources, which not only affects their own systems but also those of the provider and others.
Resources are utilized in an environment where sensitive programs and data from competitors are processed on shared resources, creating again the potential for misuse. This is one of the main security issues, since in a business environment competitors distrust each other, and the fear of industrial espionage is always present. Currently, human trust is the strategy used to deal with these threats. The relationship between grid users and resource providers ranges from highly trusted to highly untrusted. This wide trust relationship occurs because grid computing itself changed from a research topic with few users to a widely deployed product that included early commercial adoption. The traditional open research communities have very low security requirements, while in contrast, business customers often operate on sensitive data that represents intellectual property; thus, their security demands are very high. In traditional grid computing, most users share the same resources concurrently. Consequently, information regarding other users and their jobs can usually be acquired quite easily. This includes, for example, that a user can see which processes are running on another user´s system. For business users, this is unacceptable since even the meta-data of their jobs is classified. As a consequence, most commercial customers are not convinced that their intellectual property in the form of software and data is protected in the grid.
This thesis proposes a novel infrastructural security solution that advances the concept of virtualized grid computing. The work started back in 2007 and led to the development of the XGE, a virtual grid management software. The XGE itself uses operating system virtualization to provide a virtualized landscape. Users’ jobs are no longer executed in a shared manner; they are executed within special sandboxed environments. To satisfy the requirements of a traditional grid setup, the solution can be coupled with an installed scheduler and grid middleware on the grid head node. To protect the prominent grid head node, a novel dual-laned demilitarized zone is introduced to make attacks more difficult. In a traditional grid setup, the head node and the computing nodes are installed in the same network, so a successful attack could also endanger the user´s software and data. While the zone complicates attacks, it is, as all security solutions, not a perfect solution. Therefore, a network intrusion detection system is enhanced with grid specific signatures. A novel software called Fence is introduced that supports end-to-end encryption, which means that all data remains encrypted until it reaches its final destination. It transfers data securely between the user´s computer, the head node and the nodes within the shielded, internal network. A lightweight kernel rootkit detection system assures that only trusted kernel modules can be loaded. It is no longer possible to load untrusted modules such as kernel rootkits. Furthermore, a malware scanner for virtualized grids scans for signs of malware in all running virtual machines. Using virtual machine introspection, that scanner remains invisible for most types of malware and has full access to all system calls on the monitored system. To speed up detection, the load is distributed to multiple detection engines simultaneously. To enable multi-site service-oriented grid applications, the novel concept of public virtual nodes is presented. This is a virtualized grid node with a public IP address shielded by a set of dynamic firewalls. It is possible to create a set of connected, public nodes, either present on one or more remote grid sites. A special web service allows users to modify their own rule set in both directions and in a controlled manner.
The main contribution of this thesis is the presentation of solutions that convey the security of grid computing infrastructures. This includes the XGE, a software that transforms a traditional grid into a virtualized grid. Design and implementation details including experimental evaluations are given for all approaches. Nearly all parts of the software are available as open source software. A summary of the contributions and an outlook to future work conclude this thesis. |
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| DOI: | 10.17192/z2011.0616 |