Towards Security Hardening of Scientific Demand-Driven and Pipelined Distributed Computing Systems

Abstract

This work highlights and takes aim at the most critical security aspects required for two different types of distributed systems for scientific computation. It covers two open-source systems written in Java: a demand-driven system -General Intensional Programming System (GIPSY) and a pipelined system -Distributed Modular Audio Recognition Framework (DMARF), which are the distributed scientific computational engines used as case studies with respect to the security aspects. More specific goals include data/demand integrity, data/demand origin authentication, confidentiality, high availability, and malicious code detection. We address some of the goals to a degree, some with the Java Data Security Framework (JDSF) as a work-inprogress.

Combining and Comparing Multiple Algorithms for Better Learning and Classification: A Case Study of MARF

“…Some scripting aspects of MARF applications are also formally proposed in Mokhov (2008f). Additionally, another frontier of the MARF's use in security is explored in Mokhov (2008e); Mokhov, Huynh, Li & Rassai (2007) as well as the digital forensics aspects that are discussed for various needs of forensic file type analysis, conversion of the MARF's internal data structures as MARFL expressions into the Forensic Lucid language for follow up forensic analysis, self-forensic analysis of MARF, and writer identification of hand-written digitized documents described in Mokhov (2008b); Mokhov & Debbabi (2008); Mokhov et al (2009); Mokhov & Vassev (2009c). Furthermore, we have a use case and applicability of MARF's algorithms for various multimedia tasks, e.g.…”

Autonomic specification of self-protection for distributed MARF with ASSL

“…This will insure the data origin authentication (the data are coming from a legitimate source) and will protect against spoofing of the data with distorted voice recordings or incorrect processed data at the later stages of the pipeline. Thus, we ensure the trustworthiness of the distributed data being processed [5].…”

“…Hence, as depicted by Figure 8, we expect the DMARF stage to verify whether a specific proxy certificate is valid and to return TRUE or FALSE. DMARF does that through the Java Data Security Framework (JDSF) [9,11,5].…”

Self-Forensics Through Case Studies of Small-to-Medium Software Systems

“…Therefore, as-is, the distributed security aspect here solely relies on the underlying communication protocols (the bottom line is Java RMI [45]). There were proposals on how to harden GIPSY security-wise [46], but there were no any means to aid a forensic investigation of security incidents with DMS or GIPSY as a whole, if they happened to occur.…”