Toward Trusted Grid Computing

Friday, October 17 at 3PM
Location:  Moore Hall, B03

Abstract

The idea of commodity computing on demand - whether expressed as a grid or a cloud or some other model - has become commonplace. Such systems have in common that they typically span inter- and intra-organisational boundaries, and so find it inherently more difficult to offer stronger security guarantees than single-organisation systems. The data and computations being processed, however, typically come with significant requirements of confidentiality and/or integrity: scientific probity and regulatory requirements demand that computations be repeatable and beyond reproach, and the computations themselves often deal with valuable intellectual property.

In short, then, there is a strong requirement for grid computing to offer trustworthy processing.  Developments of trusted platform technologies and virtualization have potential to make this a reality. This talk will describe our present ideas about how to use these technologies to deliver incremental improvements for scientists using grid platform such as BOINC, Condor, or Globus, and our ideas for realizing an implementation of these.

This is joint work with Andrew Cooper.

Bio

Dr Andrew Martin lectures to Software Professionals as part of Oxford University's Software Engineering Programme. He has a background in formal methods, but today devotes most of his time to issues of security in distributed systems. He has been particularly interested in the grid computing paradigm, the security questions that raises, and how the technologies of trusted computing can help to address the challenges in that area.

Andrew wrote a doctoral thesis on the subject 'Machine-Assisted Theorem Proving for Software Engineering', in the early 1990s. He then worked as a Research Fellow in the Software Verification Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. Returning to the UK, he was briefly a lecturer at the University of Southampton, before returning to Oxford to take up his present post in 1999. Dr Martin is a fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.

• Presentation Slides [PPT]