Advisor:

BOINC is a middleware that builds the largest grids on Earth out of com-modity hardware offered by volunteers. Although BOINC has a large user base, it suffers from two fundamental limitations: first, it can only provide limited security to volunteer machines; second, creating large-scale projects is a formidable task only accessible to a few. Virtualization is a concept introduced many years ago, but its recent mas-sification to commodity hardware provides fertile ground for improvements in many applications. Virtualization is one of the forms of sand-boxing, where applications are confined to a closed environment, to prevent them from causing any harm to the system. Enabling BOINC to use sand-boxing technologies can provide the security that volunteers expect, while, at the same time, they can also simplify the task of project creators. Additionally, this approach can bring a number of very interesting byproducts, such as simplified checkpointing. The goal of this project is to create a virtualized environment for appli-cations. Our solution should bring security to volunteers and simplicity to project owners. By abstracting at the level of the execution environment we guarantee that this solution is very flexible and future proof