Towards a Security Service Integration Framework for Distributed Real-Time Systems

Tao Xie and Xiao Qin*

Department of Computer Science

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

801 Leroy Place, Socorro, New Mexico 87801-4796

{xietao, xqin}@cs.nmt.edu

Real-time applications with security requirements are increasingly emerging in parallel and distributed systems. However, the complexities and specialities of diverse security mechanisms dissuade users from employing existing security services for their applications. To effectively tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a security middleware (SMW) framework from which security-sensitive real-time applications are enabled to exploit a variety of security services to enhance the trustworthy executions of the applications. A quality of security control manager (QSCM), a centerpiece of the framework, is capable of achieving a flexible trade-off between overheads caused by security services and system performance, especially under high workload conditions where available resources are dynamically changing and insufficient. A security-aware scheduling mechanism, which plays a key role in QSCM, is able to maximize quality of security for real-time applications running on parallel and distributed systems like clusters and Grids.

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems, September 12-14, 2005.

* Contact author.  http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~xqin

---