[PRL] Fwd: [temp] Seminars Digest, Vol 92, Issue 9

[Mitchell Wand]

Some interesting stuff here...  --Mitch

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <seminars-request at lists.csail.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [temp] Seminars Digest, Vol 92, Issue 9
To: seminars at lists.csail.mit.edu



Today's Topics:

  1. TALK:Monday 8-16-10 Thesis Defense: Design and Applications
     of a      Secure and Decentralized Distributed Hash Table
     (Csail Event Calendar)
  2. TALK:Monday 8-16-10 Practical memory safety for C
     (Csail Event Calendar)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Csail Event Calendar <eventcalendar at csail.mit.edu>
To: seminars at csail.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:01:02 -0400
Subject: TALK:Monday 8-16-10 Thesis Defense: Design and Applications of a
Secure and Decentralized Distributed Hash Table

Thesis Defense: Design and Applications of a Secure and Decentralized
Distributed Hash Table
Speaker: Chris Lesniewski-Laas
Speaker Affiliation: MIT CSAIL
Host: M Frans Kaashoek
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

Date: 8-16-2010
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Location: 32-G449 (Kiva)

Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are a powerful building block for highly
scalable decentralized systems.  They route requests over a structured
overlay
network to the node responsible for a given key.  DHTs are subject to the
well-known Sybil attack, in which an adversary creates many false identities
in order to increase its influence and deny service to honest participants.
Defending against this attack is challenging because (1) in an open network,
creating many fake identities is cheap; (2) an attacker can subvert periodic
routing table maintenance to increase its influence over time; and (3)
specific keys can be targeted by clustering attacks.  As a result, without
centralized admission control, existing DHTs cannot provide strong
availability guarantees.

In this talk, I'll describe Whānau, a new DHT routing protocol which is both
efficient and strongly resistant to the Sybil attack.  Whānau solves this
long-open problem by using the social connections between users to build
routing tables that enable Sybil-resistant one-hop lookups.  The number of
Sybils in the social network does not affect the protocol's performance, but
links between honest users and Sybils do.  With a social network of N
well-connected honest nodes, Whānau provably tolerates up to O(N/log N) such
"attack edges".  This means that an attacker must hoodwink a large fraction
of
the honest users before any lookups will fail.  Large-scale experimental
results will confirm that Whānau provides high availability in the face of
powerful Sybil attacks.

Relevant URL(S):
For more information please contact: Chris Lesniewski-Laas, 617-253-0004,
ctl at mit.edu




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Csail Event Calendar <eventcalendar at csail.mit.edu>
To: seminars at csail.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:01:02 -0400
Subject: TALK:Monday 8-16-10 Practical memory safety for C

Practical memory safety for C
Speaker: Periklis Akritidis
Speaker Affiliation: University of Cambridge, UK
Host: Nickolai Zeldovich
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

Date: 8-16-2010
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Refreshments: 10:45 AM
Location: 32-G449 (Patil/Kiva)

C facilitates high performance execution and low-level systems programming,
but the lack of memory safety undermines security and reliability; for
example, memory corruption bugs can breach security and faults in kernel
extensions can bring down the entire operating system. Unfortunately, memory
safe languages are unlikely to displace C in the near future, and solutions
currently in use offer inadequate protection. Comprehensive proposals, on
the
other hand, are either too slow for practical use, or break backwards
compatibility by requiring source code porting or generating incompatible
binary code. My talk will present backwards-compatible solutions to prevent
dangerous memory corruption in C programs at a low cost.

Periklis Akritidis is a PhD candidate in the Computer Lab at the University
of Cambridge, UK. His research interests include systems and computer and
network security. His advisor is Dr. Steven Hand.

Relevant URL(S):
For more information please contact: Nickolai Zeldovich, 617-253-6005,
nickolai at csail.mit.edu



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