  Over the past decade, high performance computational (HPC) clusters have
become mainstream in academic and industrial settings as accessible means of
computation. Throughout their proliferation, HPC security has been a secondary
concern to performance. It is evident, however, that ensuring HPC security
presents different challenges than the ones faced when dealing with traditional
networks. To design suitable security measures for high performance computing,
it is necessary to first realize the threats faced by such an environment. This
task can be accomplished by the means of constructing a comprehensive threat
model. To our knowledge, no such threat model exists with regards to Cluster
Computing. In this paper, we explore the unique challenges of securing HPCs and
propose a threat model based on the classical Confidentiality, Integrity and
Availability security principles.
