Securing stateful grid servers through virtual server rotation
Matthew Smith, Christian Schridde, Bernd Freisleben · 2008
The Grid computing paradigm is aimed at providing seamless access to different kinds of resources, such as compute clusters, data, special appliances and even people. Like most complex IT systems, Grid middleware systems exhibit a number of security problems, and there will always be attacks that are unknown and can circumvent even the best security measures and intrusion detection systems. This creates the requirement that Grid environments should be equipped with intrusion tolerance mechanisms as well as with the traditional intrusion prevention and intrusion detection mechanisms. In this paper, we present a new intrusion tolerance approach which improves the security of stateful WSRF Grid servers against stealth attacks. The proposal is based on a novel server rotation strategy utilizing paravirtualization to close attack windows for stateful service-oriented Grid headnode servers. A flexible plugin based rotation manager deals with the complex issue of stateful connections to the Grid server, and a database connector is utilized to detach service state from the rotating functional components of the Grid server. A prototypical implementation based on the Globus Toolkit 4 is presented.