Protecting Non-dedicated Cluster Environments by Marking Processes with Stigmata

Abstract

This paper proposes mechanisms for the protection of high-performance systems that are built of non-dedicated workstations. Such workstations may potentially be under control of malicious users that may gain complete control over the processes running there. The protection is achieved by a careful assignment of processes to computing nodes. If a process runs on a workstation with limited credibility, it receives a "stigma " that prevents it to access sensitive data. If it later attempts such an access, a process rollback is used to repeat the execution on a more trusted node. By implementing these mechanisms, it is possible to utilize idle computing resources without exposing sensitive data to untrusted persons.