Title: Security and privacy threats to volunteer computing

Authors: J.H. Abawajy

Addresses: School of Engineering and Information Technology, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, 3072, Australia

Abstract: The vision of volunteer computing is to provide large scale computational infrastructure by using dynamic collections of donated desktop computers. There have been many works that highlighted the significant benefits of volunteer computing but little on the security and privacy threats associated with its exploitation. However, volunteer computing is vulnerable to a variety of attacks and presents numerous significant security threats to the stakeholders. This paper presents security and privacy threat taxonomy along with the security features developed to cope with such threats.

Keywords: volunteer computing; security threats; privacy threats; attacks; parallel computing; security defence; computational infrastructure; critical infrastructures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2008.017439

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2008 Vol.4 No.3, pp.245 - 255

Published online: 07 Mar 2008 *

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