Safely Harnessing Wide Area Surrogate Computing or How to Avoid Building the Perfect Platform for Network Attacks

We are building a wide area surrogate computing platform, called WASCo, that allows users to dynamically locate, allocate, and exploit resources on surrogate computers spread around the Internet. WASCo allows clients to install and run arbitrary code on surrogates. Uses of WASCo include offloading energy-intensive operations from energy-constrained devices, executing bandwidth-intensive queries near a large data source, creating a dynamic resilient overlay network (RON) to route around internet problems, or instantiating a new web server near underserved clients in response to a spike in traffic.

While a surrogate infrastructure like WASCo has a huge number of beneficial uses, the ability to run arbitrary code on surrogates distributed across the internet could make it the perfect platform for spammers, hackers, content thieves, and other nefarious individuals. In this paper, we discuss the network security issues that must be addressed before wide area surrogate systems can be safely deployed and present our solutions. We show how a combination of virtual machine technology for local resource controls, network security implemented at the virtual machine monitor level, and a trust infrastructure can address the key security problems.