Treffer: Infrastructural Security for Virtualized Grid Computing ; Infrastrukturelle Sicherheit im virtualisierten 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 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 ...