Cryptographic Methods for Securing the YML Framework

YML framework is a well-adapted advanced tool to support designing and executing portable parallel applications over large scale peer to peer and grid middlewares. We believe that it is necessary to consider the crucial security concerns for the improvement and extension of the framework. In this paper, two security mechanisms were introduced for the first time. To ensure the computing resources being utilized properly and legitimately, a lightweight authentication protocol was proposed, enabling the user to log in YML with 2 XOR and 1 HASH operation, meanwhile, a splitting way was adopted to distribute the secret key, making only the application requester can obtain the result. To safeguard the process of data exchanging, an efficient threshold encryption scheme was proposed. By generating a set of matched pieces of key, the data can be transformed into efficiently-recoverable half-ciphertext, which is able to transfer in public channel securely. Furthermore, dynamical addition of peers is supported in the scheme.