Distributed Execution with Remote Audit.
Fabian Monrose, Peter Wyckoff, Aviel D. Rubin · 1999
Recently, there has been a rapidly expanding body of work with the vision of seamlessly integrating idle networked computers into virtual computing environ-ments. This is enabled primarily by the success of re-search eorts promoting parallel and distributed com-puting on networks of workstations and the wide accep-tance of Java. The proliferation of work in this area has provided new Internet-based infrastructures that har-ness the power of computing bases comprising hun-dreds of loosely-connected volunteered machines (i.e., hosts). While many of these systems have proposed the use of non-altruistic market-based schemes for promot-ing large-scale participation, mechanisms for ensuring that hosts participating in collaborative computing en-vironments perform the work assigned to them have been largely ignored. This paper presents our imple-mentation of one framework that layers a remote audit mechanism on top of an existing distributed comput-ing model, and provides eÆcient methods for verifying, with a tunable level of certainty, whether a remote host performed the task it was assigned. 1