Another approach you might want to look into is to run each grid app in it's own appdomain and limit the abilities of that app domain. You can lock it down to a specific directory if the executor service is dropping data files to given directories for a grid app. You could lock out app domains from using the System.Net namespaces there by limiting phone home abilities and you can make the executor more resilent by allowing the offending app domain to die upon an unhandled exception rather than bringing down the executor. You could also take advantage of caching grid apps on the client machine where you wouldn't have to push or sip that app if you already have the dlls on your system. .NET 2.0 does a very good job of allowing you set up Sandboxing environs using app domains.
John
On 2/21/06, Krishna <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
I guess a simple way to prevent "grid-viruses", would be to use the .NEt
CAS (Code access security)
feature. We will need to implement some code in Alchemi to run user code
under reduced priveleges inside a sand-box kind of environment on
an Executor.
Cheers
Krishna.
Jonathan Mitchem wrote:
>I've been thinking about security recently, and started questioning
>the security of a distributed system such as Alchemi.
>
>Is there anything that actually "constrains" the grid environment on a
>machine so that a user doesn't allow some sort of distributed malware
>to damage their machine?
>
>For instance, an application that reads the files on the machine
>hosting the Executor, searches for certain files or filetypes (like,
>password and private key files), and then sends them to a specified
>address. And maybe even proceeds to break their encryption.
>
>Or, an application that creates several threads so that every machine
>has a copy of the required DLLs, which subsequently proceeds to remove
>critical system files from every machine.
>
>Is there anything to prevent such sort of usage? And if not (since
>I'm presuming there isn't), how would we go about preventing such
>damage?
>
>
>Jonathan
>
>
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