SilverlineHPC: Assessment System for Secure High Performance Computing

Formerly relegated to research institutions and behind closed doors, modern large-scale computing systems are often used for critical infrastructure modeling and control. These high-performance computing systems are now often geographically distributed and exposed to the Internet, becoming attractive resources for potential misuse and cyberattack. As high-performance computing systems grow more widely distributed, simply firewalling and isolating the system is no longer feasible as a solution. SilverlineHPC is a software system for modeling, analyzing, and automatically evaluating the security configurations of large-scale distributed systems. SilverlineHPC uses attack trees to model risks to distributed computing systems, adding tools that facilitate the analysis of very large-scale systems. The software then performs automated evaluations and computations on the attack trees, testing on-line to see whether particular vulnerabilities are present or known-weak configurations or libraries are in use, then computing metrics and costs based on component metrics. The goal of the Phase I effort is to develop and test a proof- of-concept prototype that focuses on the key technical challenges of our approach. This prototype will build on the company’s existing Silverline software, developing and demonstrating high-performance computing-specific automated evaluation and analysis features. Specifically, the effort will add assessment methods targeted at common computing libraries and frameworks in use by commercial and critical infrastructure sectors. It will also enhance Silverline’s scale, providing effective tools for the modeling and evaluation of large-scale computing systems with hundreds of nodes, actors, and interconnection paths. SilverlineHPC, developed by ATC-NY for the Department of Energy under a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant, increases the safety and security of high-performance computing and large-scale computing systems that are used for power grid analysis, healthcare, and critical infrastructure applications. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: SilverlineHPC will increase the safety and security of the critical infrastructure controlled by distributed computing systems. At the same time, SilverlineHPC’s systematic, auditable approach to security risks will encourage new infrastructure processes to be automated—bringing increased efficiency and lower operating costs. SilverlineHPC’s approach provides similar benefits to healthcare, power grid modeling, and other compute-intensive sectors.