Distributed Computing with a Trojan Horse

Growing numbers of households are getting broadband Internet connections, forming an attractive platform for distributed computing. We describe how a trojan horse for covert distributed computing could be constructed: the mechanisms used, and how the user could be tricked to install the trojan using a known Microsoft Outlook Express vulnerability. The gains and risks of such a construction are considered. We found that such a trojan is straightforward to implement, even using a high level language such as Java. While installation of the trojan is platform dependent, the actual trojan can be run on any Java platform.