ES-MPICH2: A Message Passing Interface with enhanced security

Abstract

In largely distributed clusters, computing nodes are geographically deployed in various computing sites. Information processed in a distributed cluster is shared among a group of distributed processes or users by virtue of messages passing protocols (e.g. message passing interface — MPI) running on the Internet. Because of the open accessible nature of the Internet, data encryption for these large-scale distributed clusters becomes a non-trivial and challenging problem. To address this issue, we enhanced the security of the MPI (Message Passing Interface) protocol by encrypting and decrypting messages sent and received among computing nodes. In this study we focused on MPI rather than other protocols because MPI is one of the most popular communication protocols for cluster computing environments. From among a variety of MPI implementations, we picked MPICH2 developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. The design goal of MPICH2 — a widely used MPI implementation — is to combine portability with high performance. We integrated encryption algorithms into the MPICH2 library so that data confidentiality of MPI applications could be readily preserved without a need to change the source codes of the MPI applications. since we provide a security enhanced MPI-library with the standard MPI interfact, data communications of a conventional MPI program can be secured without converting the program into the corresponding secure version. We used Sandia Micro Benchmark and Intel MPI Benchmarks to evaluate and compared the performance of original MPICH2 and Enhanced Security MPICH2. According to the performance evaluation, ES-MPICH2 provides secured Message Passing Interface by sacrificing reasonable system performance.