Dynamic system-wide reconfiguration of grid deployments in response to intrusion detections

As Grids become increasingly relied upon as critical infrastructure, it is imperative to ensure the highly-available and secure day-to-day operation of the Grid infrastructure. The current approach for Grid management is generally to have geographically-distributed system administrators contact each other by phone or email to debug Grid behavior and subsequently modify or reconfigure the deployed Grid software. For security-related events such as the required patching of vulnerable Grid software, this ad hoc process can take too much time, is error-prone and tedious, and thus is unlikely to completely solve the problems. In this paper, we present the application of the ANDREA management system to control Grid service functionality in near-real-time at scales of thousands of services with minimal human involvement. We show how ANDREA can be used to better ensure the security of the Grid: In experiments using 11,394 Globus Toolkit v4 deployments we show the performance of ANDREA for three increasingly-sophisticated reactions to an intruder detection: shutting down the entire Grid; incrementally eliminating Grid service for different classes of users; and issuing and applying a patch to the vulnerability exploited by the attacker. We believe that this work is an important first step toward automating the general day-to-day monitoring and reconfiguration of all aspects of Grid deployments.