Single attestation image for a trusted and scalable grid

Abstract

Traditionally, Grid users are forced to trust the Grid platforms, but the users are not always regarded as trustworthy. This trust asymmetry hinders the commercializing of Grid resources. Trusted Grid is proposed to tackle this challenge by leveraging Trusted Computing (TC). However, the TC relies on a microcontroller Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) which has limited computing power and is doomed to be a system bottleneck. This article constructs a trusted Grid as a flat ring and decentralizes the functionalities of TPM across the ring. This architecture offers a single attestation image which provides a transparent attestation to a scalable, large-scale, and dynamic trusted Grid. The architecture also significantly reduces the frequency of attestations, thus alleviating the TPM bottleneck. Furthermore, the architecture can avoid the potential system bottleneck and single point of failure of the centralized architecture or the root node of the hierarchical architecture.