Architectural support for enhancing security in clusters

Abstract

Cluster computing has emerged as a common approach for providing more comput- ing and data resources in industry as well as in academia. However, since cluster computer developers have paid more attention to performance and cost e±ciency than to security, numerous security loopholes in cluster servers come to the forefront. Clusters usually rely on ¯rewalls for their security, but the ¯rewalls cannot prevent all security attacks; therefore, cluster systems should be designed to be robust to security attacks intrinsically. In this research, we propose architectural supports for enhancing security of clus- ter systems with marginal performance overhead. This research proceeds in a bottom- up fashion starting from enforcing each cluster component's security to building an integrated secure cluster. First, we propose secure cluster interconnects providing con- ¯dentiality, authentication, and availability. Second, a security accelerating network interface card architecture is proposed to enable low performance overhead encryption and authentication. Third, to enhance security in an individual cluster node, we pro- pose a secure design for shared-memory multiprocessors (SMP) architecture, which is deployed in many clusters. The secure SMP architecture will provide con¯dential communication between processors. This will remove the vulnerability of eavesdrop- ping attacks in a cluster node. Finally, to put all proposed schemes together, we propose a security/performance trade-o® model which can precisely predict performance of an integrated secure cluster.