Host protection in grid computing

One of the main concerns preventing grid computing from being widely spread and utilized is the related security issues. Users in a grid are concerned about the protection of their resources and about their privacy. When a host interacts with a grid, its security may be threatened in terms of its data or its computational resources. We discuss the issue of ensuring host security and propose a solution which consists of a monitor running on the host system. The monitors responsibility is to detect any malicious action coming from a grid application running on the host, either through data attacks or job starvation, and to take corrective action. Testing results show that the proposed monitor manages to detect and stop both data theft attacks and job starvation immediately and it is able to run efficiently even if a malicious application is consuming almost 100% of the CPU power.