[Colloq] [administrative-staff] Talk by Yair Amir, March 20, 10:30am-11:45am, 366 WVH

[Kondri, Rosa]

Talk by Yair Amir, Thursday March 20th,  10:30am-11:45am, 366 WVH.

Host: Agnes Chan

Title:  "Toward Intrusion Tolerant Clouds"

Abstract:

Cloud computing presents a new, cost effective approach to run the world's IT infrastructure and the trend will likely continue as a result of the economic benefits of scale. In this world, availability, reliability and security are paramount.

We begin by surveying our experience with cloud architectures, starting from basic overlay architecture research, continuing through research focused on the specific application domain of real-time multimedia, and culminating in a commercial cloud networking service that serves the live TV industry.

Our experience taught us that the large gap in this global architecture is the vulnerability to intrusions: cloud monitoring and control messages must work at some level at all times, even in the presence of intrusions, for the system or its administrators to react to and resolve problems. However, the algorithms necessary to build a distributed messaging system at a global scale that guarantees integrity and performance of monitoring and control even under sophisticated intrusion attacks, do not exist in practice.

We present an intrusion-tolerant messaging system that supports monitoring and control of global clouds in intrusion-prone environments. We present two dissemination methods, K-Paths and Controlled Flooding, providing a tradeoff between the overhead incurred and the level of intrusion tolerance achieved. We show how these methods can support the necessary distinct semantics for monitoring and for control.

Finally, we present a software diversity approach that curtails the ability of an attacker to use the same exploit repeatedly to take over the entire messaging system.


Bio:



Yair Amir is a Professor of Computer Science and director of the Distributed Systems and Networks lab at Johns Hopkins University, where his goal is to invent high performance, survivable and secure distributed systems that make a difference.  Dr. Amir holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He served on various technical program committees including co-chair of the IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) for 2015, and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. He is a creator of the Spread group communication toolkit (www.spread.org<http://www.spread.org>), used in thousands of installations around the world in commercial, academic and government settings. He led Secure Spread, developing the first robust key agreement protocols, as well as the Spines overlay network platform (www.spines.org<http://www.spines.org>), the SMesh wireless mesh network (www.smesh.org<http://www.smesh.org>), the first sea  mless
802.11 mesh with fast lossless handoff, and the Prime Byzantine Replication engine (www.dsn.jhu.edu<http://www.dsn.jhu.edu>), the first to provide performance guarantees while under attack. More recently, he led the development of the LTN cloud (www.ltnglobal.com<http://www.ltnglobal.com>), offering a global transport service for broadcast-quality live TV. That service was adopted by major broadcasters like CNN, Fox, ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, NBC, PBS, Turner and others.



Best,
Rosa


_______________________________________________________________________________
Rosa Kondri
Administrative Assistant

Northeastern University
College of Computer and Information Science
360 Huntington Ave.
202 West Village H
Boston, MA  02115

Phone: 617.373.2462
Fax: 617.373.5121