Introduction
Grid computing is kind of new technology which has been known since 1990s. It idea was brought together by Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke, widely regardes as “Father of Grid”. Grid computing is defined as group of node computation which works together in distributed computing. You can find some grid project in wikipedia article here.
Each node in grid has computer cluster to perform high performance computing through parallel computation. A computer cluster consists of a headnode (master) and some computational nodes (slaves). Headnode is responsible in communicating with the other headnode in grid, managing computation resource, and scheduling computation jobs to slave. We don’t want to explain detail how computer cluster works. In this article, our interest is in grid computing and why it’s vulnerable to some hacking exploitation.
How Grid Works
Grid computing is really complex inside its technology, so the chance of being exploited is really big. Grid computing needs a good network connectivity, many TCP/IP services, encryption, parallel programming, and web service. A headnode of cluster trusts the other because valid Certificate Authority (CA) is installed on both of headnode. CA which installed on headnode is called as Host CA. TCP/IP services is needed in headnode to send or receive data or execute jobs between two or more headnodes. There is two services in headnode which need to communicate a headnode to other, 1st is GridFTP service which is responsible in data transfer between two or more headnodes and 2nd is Web Service Container which is responsible in receiving jobs from user. Both services can be activated by installing Globus Toolkit which is de facto standard open source software for grid.
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