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Wall St. Trading Servers To Power Off-Hour Clouds?
miller60 writes "As cloud computing gains traction, some Wall Street firms running armadas of servers to power high-frequency trading operations are contemplating leasing out their excess computing capacity after the trading day ends at 4 p.m. 'Once 4:30 rolls around, we don't need those machines,' said one CTO of a market data firm. 'There may be an opportunity there.' A similar revelation led to the creation of the cloud computing operation at Amazon.com, which built its infrastructure to handle peak Christmas-season loads that lasted just a few weeks each year."
This seems like a security nightmare waiting to happen. I understand everything would likely be virtualized, but it just makes me nervous that you would be able to rent time on servers that interact with the stock market, especially considering how panicky the market can be, and how badly everyone suffers when it does panic.
I sure hope Wall Street is utterly confident in the security of their operating systems, VMs, low-level peripheral firmware, etc. Because if they're not absolutely confident, they should treat all of those machines as potentially untrusted from the moment they open them up to the world. This holds even if they constantly re-image.
When you're talking about the kind of money Wall Street stands to lose from a clever security breach, no amount of paranoia is too ridiculous.
Not to derail the conversation, but high frequency trading doesn't contribute much to the stock market's ability to set optimal prices.
What actually happens is that high frequency traders squeeze in while prices are moving and they siphon off money. Neither the original seller, nor the original buyer gets the best price, and the high frequency traders make a mint.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Said the CTO who is now looking for a job.
NYSE closes at 4:30. But there are other markets. And the data flows 24/7.
There is no reason for these systems to have spare cycles.
But Virtual Machine's are only as good as they're designed. Even the most known and biggest vendor VMWare has had serious bug and exploits in their software. For one example see this, which let an exe running in the guest OS exploit a vulnerability in the VM code to get code run in the host OS. A serious security risk, especially when were talking about Wall Street. Even getting an access to their internal network opens new possibilities.
Just because of this I think it's a stupid idea. Even more so because the gain is not really that much, but it can be really destructive. Someone will find a way to exploit it.
Yes. If Amazon went down tomorrow and never came back, society would be fine. If the stock exchange were taken over by malicious but hidden computer software for months, and then finally was taken down, the damage to society would be MUCH more severe. It's not just a way of exchanging everything, it's a way of establishing who owns what. If suddenly nobody knows who really owns every stock that's traded in the last six months, we've got a major frikkin problem. We shouldn't, maybe, but we do because money is an illusion.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I could see this being useful as some sort of "private" cloud during off hours (i.e. selling time to banks for batch and accrual operations...etc), but allowing the unwashed masses access to the underlying infrastructure of something as important as financial trading just seems like a recipe for a security disaster.
I guess if an idea is 20+ years old the statute of limitations has run out and someone can use it again as NEW and EXCITING.
You could have the exploit install something into the host OS and have it run when the regular stuff is back on and connected.