Trust maintenance toward virtual computing environment in the grid service

Abstract

The latest virtual machine technology has provided us a better means of customizing executing environment for jobs in a Grid computing service. However, this is far from enough to guarantee the correctness of the computing outcome, since the executing environments may be compromised, for example some executable contents or configuration files may be tampered or some untrusty packages may be installed in the executing environment. If so, the results of the computing tasks would undoubtedly be affected. In this article, by taking advantage of the virtual machine technology and the relevant ideas in the field of Security and Attestation, two mechanisms are proposed to offer Grid service the function of guaranteeing the trustiness of virtual machine computing environment - Trust Attestation for virtual software environment based on TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and TKVI (Trusted Kernel of Virtual OS Image), and the Trusted Loading Method for virtual machine based on Xen. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.