with the widespread use of the distributed systems comes the need to secure such systems against a wide variety of threats . recent security mechanisms are grossly inadequate in authenticating the program executions at the clients or servers , as the clients , servers and the executing programs themselves can be compromised after the clients and servers pass the authentication phase . a generic framework is provided for authenticating remote executions on a potentially untrusted remote server — essentially validating that what is executed at the server on behalf of the client is actually the intended program . details of a prototype linux implementation are also described , along with some optimization techniques for reducing the run - time overhead of the present scheme . the performance overhead of this technique varies generally from 7 % to 24 % for most benchmarks , as seen from the actual remote execution of spec benchmarks .