Rolling curve ECC for Centralized Key Management System used in ECC-MPICH2
Shridhar Shivaramakrishnan, Sachin D. Babar · 2014
In a cluster the nodes are connected via a shared network to each other. With the increasing popularity of clusters being deployed over widespread networks that have access to internet, there is an alarming increase in threats to security of programs running on the clusters. We are using Message Passing Interface as it is a widely accepted protocol for parallel computing. The version being considered here is MPICH2. There are approaches already available to secure the cluster communication as in ECC-MPICH2, ES-MPICH2, and MPISec I/O etc. This paper primarily references the work and model of CKMS-MPI and tries to further improve its security. The novelty is enhancing data security of the centralized key management system. This is achieved by introducing a rolling curve methodology in ECC where by each time the curve used for transmission of data will keep changing. This will ensure higher security in data transfer because each time a new curve will be used. Addendum is to have separate set of curves for each node to ensure even if one node is compromised the other nodes can still be kept secured. Since the above mechanism will be incorporated into the same Centralized Key Management System (CKMS-MPI) the performance impact is minimum as there is only a startup overhead involved. To summarize, we are proposing a more sophisticated Rolling curve mechanism for key management infrastructure to handle the Centralized Key Management using ECC.