Deploying Virtual Machines as Sandboxes for the Grid

The ability to securely run arbitrary untrusted code on a wide variety of execution platforms is a challenging problem in the Grid community. One way to achieve this is to run the code inside a contained, isolated environment, namely a “sandbox”. Virtual machines provide a natural solution to the security and resource management issues that arise in sandboxing. We explore different designs for the VM-enabled sandbox and evaluate them with respect to various factors like structure, security guarantees, user convenience, feasibility and overheads in one such grid environment. Our experiments indicate that the use of on-demand VMs imposes a constant startup overhead, with I/O-intensive applications incurring additional overheads depending on the design of the sandbox.