Addressing the trust asymmetry problem in grid computing with encrypted computation

Trust asymmetry is a core, albeit rarely discussed, problem in scalable computing. Techniques for protecting a host's operating system (and other processes) from a user's process are well understood and widely deployed. However, there is currently no way to protect the user's process from the OS. Hence, while the host's owner need not trust the user at all, the user must trust the owner completely. This, we argue, leads to practical limits to scalability for computation that, because of encryption, simply do not exist for communication. We argue that it is imperative for the grid computing community to address this problem using encrypted computation techniques. We then propose a simple mechanism for encrypted computation of Boolean circuits and show how it can likely be generalized for use in an object code translator.