Building secure resources to ensure safe computations in distributed and potentially corrupted environments

Abstract

Security and fault-tolerance is a major issue for intensive parallel computing in pervasive environments with hardware errors or malicious acts that may alter the result. In [1,2] is presented a novel, robust and secure architecture able to offer intensive parallel computing in environments where resources may be corrupted. Some efficient result-checking mechanisms are used to certify the results of an execution. The architecture is based on a limited number of safe resources that host the checkpoint server (used to store the graph) and the verifiers able to securely re-execute piece of tasks in a trusted way. This article focus on the effective construction of strongly secured resources. Our approach combine both software and hardware components to cover the full spectrum of security constraints. The proposed computing platform is validated over a medical application and some experimental results are presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.