[Colloq] Hiring Talk: MONDAY, JANUARY 31 - Patrick Widener, Georgia Tech

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents:

SPEAKER: Patrick Widener
          Georgia Tech

TITLE: Dynamic Differential Data Protection in High-Performance
Middleware

TIME: Monday, January 31, 10:30 AM

PLACE: WVH 366

ABSTRACT:

Modern distributed applications are long-lived, are expected
to provide flexible and adaptive data services, and must meet the
functionality and scalability challenges posed by dynamically changing
user communities in heterogeneous execution environments.  The practical
implications of these requirements are that reconfiguration and upgrades
are increasingly necessary, but opportunities to perform such tasks
offline are greatly reduced.  Developers are responding to this 
situation by dynamically extending or adjusting application 
functionality and by tuning application performance, a typical method 
being the incorporation of client- or context-specific code into 
applications' execution loops.

Prior work has highlighted the performance advantages provided by
dynamic
code extension or specialization. Our work addresses a basic roadblock
in deploying such solutions, which is the protection of key application
components and sensitive data in distributed applications.
Our approach, termed Dynamic Differential Data Protection (D3P),
provides fine-grain methods for providing component-based protection
in distributed applications. Context-sensitive, application-specific
security
methods are deployed at runtime to enforce restrictions in data access
and
manipulation. D3P is suitable for use in low- or zero-downtime
environments,
since such deployments are performed while applications run,
D3P is appropriate for high performance environments and for highly
scalable applications like publish/subscribe, because it creates native
codes via dynamic binary code generation. Finally, due to its
integration
into middleware, D3P can run across a wide variety of operating system
and machine platforms.

This talk introduces the need for D3P, using sample applications from
the high performance and pervasive computing domains to illustrate
the problems addressed by our D3P solution. It also describes how
D3P can be integrated into modern middleware. Experimental evaluations
demonstrate the fine-grain nature of D3P, that is, its ability to
capture
individual end users' or components' needs for data protection, and they
also
describe the performance implications of using D3P in data-intensive
applications.

Host: Rajmohan Rajaraman

BIO:

Patrick Widener is a Ph.D. candidate (read: professional student) in the
College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  He works
in the systems research group and his primary research interest is
middleware.