Support for Security in Distributed Systems Using Messiahs

The messiahs project is investigating the construction of a set of mechanisms to support task placement in autonomous, heterogeneous, distributed systems. In this paper we explore aspects of the messiahs system that support security in distributed systems. In particular, we will concentrate on aspects of messiahs that defeat denial of service attacks, provide firewalls, protect private system description information, and support matching of tasks and systems based on security ratings. Development of these features will allow tasks to be scheduled in a heterogeneous distributed system, while protecting data and system integrity. messiahs is a set of mechanisms that ties together disparate computing resources to achieve distributed processing without sacrificing local control. messiahs is novel in that it includes support for autonomous systems while providing flexible, scalable mechanisms to implement scheduling algorithms for heterogeneous distributed systems.