Enhancing Security of Real-Time Applications on Grids through Dynamic Scheduling

Tao Xie     Xiao Qin*

Department of Computer Science

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

801 Leroy Place, Socorro, New Mexico 87801

Real-time applications with security requirements are emerging in various areas including government, education, and business. The security sensitive real-time applications can take full advantage of a grid environment that allows grid participants to exercise a fine-grained control and allocation of computational resources. However, conventional real-time scheduling algorithms failed to fulfill the security requirements of real-time applications. In this paper we propose a dynamic real-time scheduling algorithm, or SAREG, which is capable of enhancing quality of security for real-time applications running on Grids. To make SAREG practical, we present a mathematical model to formally describe a scheduling framework, security-sensitive real-time applications, and security overheads. We leverage the model to measure security overheads incurred by an array of security services, including encryption, authentication, integrity check, etc. The SAREG algorithm seamlessly integrates security requirements into real-time scheduling by employing the security overhead model. To evaluate the effectiveness of SAREG, we conducted extensive simulations using a real world trace from a supercomputing centre. Our experimental results show that SAREG significantly improves system performance in terms of quality of security and schedulability over three existing scheduling algorithms.

Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing (JSSPP'05), Cambridge, MA, June 19, 2005. * Contact author.  http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~xqin

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