Trusted Deployment of Virtual Execution Environment in Grid Systems

Grids are constructed to integrate different kinds of resources and services in distributed computing environments. Grid users may transfer their applications and data to remote grid nodes which are easy to be compromised. In this paper, we utilize trusted computing and virtualization technologies to construct trusted execution environments in grid systems. Grid nodes are equipped with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and secure Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) in order to provide a Trusted Computing Base (TCB) for job execution environment. A secure Virtual Machine (VM) for protecting job execution can be deployed into a grid node remotely. During the VM deployment, current configuration information in a grid node is reported to a remote party for remote attestation. Furthermore, encryption technologies are used to protect grid jobs during their whole lifecycle. Experiments and analysis show our method is efficient and secure.