Implementing a Secure Academic Grid System - A Malaysian Case

Computational grids have become very popular in the recent times due to their capabilities and flexibility in handling large computationally intensive jobs. When it comes to the implementation of practical grid systems, security plays a major role due to the confidentiality of the information handled and the nature of the resources employed. Also due to the complex nature of the grid operations, grid systems face unique security threats compared to other distributed systems. This paper describes how to implement a secure grid system with special emphasis on the steps to be followed in obtaining, implementing and testing PKI certificates

Security Services Lifecycle Management in On-Demand Infrastructure Services Provisioning

require high-performance and complicated network and computer infrastructure to support distributed collaborating groups of researchers and applications that should be provisioned on-demand. The effective use and management of the dynamically provisioned services can be achieved by using the Service Delivery Framework (SDF) proposed by TeleManagement Forum that provides a good basis for defining the whole services life cycle management and supporting infrastructure services. The paper discusses conceptual issues, basic requirements and practical suggestions for provisioning consistent security services as a part of the general e-Science infrastructure provisioning, in particular Grid and Cloud based. The proposed Security Services Lifecycle Management (SSLM) model extends the existing frameworks with additional stages such as “Reservation Session Binding ” and “Registration and Synchronisation ” that specifically target such security issues as the provisioned resources restoration, upgrade or migration and provide a mechanism for remote executing environment and data protection by binding them to the session context. The paper provides a short overview of the existing standards and technologies and refers to the on-going projects and experience in developing dynamic distributed security services

Control-Flow Security.

Computer security is a topic of paramount importance in computing today. Though enormous effort has been expended to reduce the software attack surface, vulnerabilities remain. In contemporary attacks, subverting the control-flow of an application is often the cornerstone to a successful attempt to compromise a system. This subversion, known as a control-flow attack, remains as an essential building block of many software exploits. This dissertation proposes a multi-pronged approach to securing software control-flow to harden the software attack surface. The primary domain of this dissertation is the elimination of the basic mechanism in software enabling control-flow attacks. I address the prevalence of such attacks by going to the heart of the problem, removing all of the operations that inject runtime data into program control. This novel approach, Control-Data Isolation, provides protection by subtracting the root of the problem; indirect control-flow. Previous works have attempted to address control-flow attacks by layering additional complexity in an effort to shield software from attack. In this work, I take a subtractive approach; subtracting the primary cause of both contemporary and classic control-flow attacks. This novel approach to security advances the state of the art in control-flow security by ensuring the integrity of the programmer-intended control-flow graph of an application at runtime. Further, this dissertation provides methodologies to eliminate the barriers to adoption of control-data isolation while simultaneously moving ahead to reduce future attacks. The secondary domain of this dissertation is technique which leverages the process by which software is engineered, tested, and executed to pinpoint the statements in software which are most likely to be exploited by an attacker, defined as the Dynamic Control Frontier. Rather than reacting to successful attacks by patching software, the approach in this dissertation will move ahead of the attacker and identify the susceptible code regions before they are compromised. In total, this dissertation combines software and hardware design techniques to eliminate contemporary control-flow attacks. Further, it demonstrates the efficacy and viability of a subtractive approach to software security, eliminating the elements underlying security vulnerabilities.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133304/1/warthur_1.pd

Re-thinking Grid Security Architecture

The security models used in Grid systems today strongly bear the marks of their diverse origin. Historically retrofitted to the distributed systems they are designed to protect and control, the security model is usually limited in scope and applicability, and its implementation tailored towards a few specific deployment scenarios. A common approach towards even the "basic" elements such as authentication to resources is only now emerging, whereas for more complex issues such as community organization, integration of site access control with operating systems, cross-domain resource provisioning, or overlay community Grids ("late authentication" for pilot job frameworks or community-based virtual machines) there is no single coherent and consistent "security" view. Via this paper we aim to share some observations on current security models and solutions found in Grid architectures and deployments today and identify architectural limitations in solving complex access control and policy enforcement scenarios in distributed resource management. The paper provides a short overview of the OGSA security services and other security solutions used in Grid middleware and operations practice. However, it is becoming clear that further development in Grid requires a fresh look at the concepts, both operationally and security-wise. This paper analyses the security aspects of different types of Grids and a set of use cases that may require extended security functionality, such as dynamic security context management, and management of stateful services. Recent developments in open systems security, and revisiting basic security concepts in networking and computing including the OSI Security Architecture and the concepts used in the Trusted Computing Base provide interesting examples on how some of the conceptual security problems in Grid can be addressed, and on how the shortcomings of current systems and the frequently proposed "ad-hoc" stop-gaps for what are in fact complex security manageability problems may be avoided. This paper is thus intended to initiate and stimulate the wider discussion on the concepts of Grid security, thereby setting the scene for and providing input to a Grid security taxonomy leading to a more consistent Grid Security Architecture