Security Threats in Volunteer Computing Environments Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)

Abstract

Volunteer Computing is a low cost and easy deployable solution for scientific projects that require large amounts of computational power. Volunteer computing public access capabilities comes with several security threats to the projects, thus, this projects must be designed and focused towards security in order to be able to stand against this threats. The following paper presents a summary of the security threats identified in volunteer computing environments deploying the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) and some solutions implementing Sanboxing Techniques on distributed computing environments.