Page 606 - (ISC)² CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide

Grid computing can also vary greatly in the computational capacity
from moment to moment. Work packets are sometimes not returned,

returned late, or returned corrupted. This requires significant
reworking and causes instability in the speed, progress,
responsiveness, and latency of the project as a whole and with
individual grid members. Time-sensitive projects might not be given
sufficient computational time to finish by a specific chronological
deadline.

Grid computing often uses a central primary core of servers to manage
the project, track work packets, and integrate returned work segments.
If the central servers are overloaded or go offline, complete failure or
crashing of the grid can occur. However, usually when central grid
systems are inaccessible, grid members complete their current local
tasks and then regularly poll to discover when the central servers come
back online. There is also a potential risk that a compromise of the
central grid servers could be leveraged to attack grid members or trick

grid members into performing malicious actions instead of the
intended purpose of the grid community.

Peer to Peer

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are networking and distributed
application solutions that share tasks and workloads among peers.

This is similar to grid computing; the primary differences are that
there is no central management system and the services provided are
usually real time rather than as a collection of computational power.
Common examples of P2P include many VoIP services, such as Skype,
BitTorrent (for data/file distribution), and Spotify (for streaming

audio/music distribution).
Security concerns with P2P solutions include a perceived inducement

to pirate copyrighted materials, the ability to eavesdrop on distributed
content, a lack of central control/oversight/management/filtering, and
the potential for services to consume all available bandwidth.

Cryptographic systems are covered in detail in Chapter 6,

“Cryptography and Symmetric Key Algorithms,” and Chapter 7,