Alpha Entanglement Codes: Practical Erasure Codes to Archive Data in Unreliable Environments

Data centres that use consumer-grade disks drives and distributed peer-to-peer systems are unreliable environments to archive data without enough redundancy. Most redundancy schemes are not completely effective for providing high availability, durability and integrity in the long-term. We propose alpha entanglement codes, a mechanism that creates a virtual layer of highly interconnected storage devices to propagate redundant information across a large scale storage system. Our motivation is to design flexible and practical erasure codes with high fault-tolerance to improve data durability and availability even in catastrophic scenarios. By flexible and practical, we mean code settings that can be adapted to future requirements and practical implementations with reasonable trade-offs between security, resource usage and performance. The codes have three parameters. Alpha increases storage overhead linearly but increases the possible paths to recover data exponentially. Two other parameters increase fault-tolerance even further without the need of additional storage. As a result, an entangled storage system can provide high availability, durability and offer additional integrity: it is more difficult to modify data undetectably. We evaluate how several redundancy schemes perform in unreliable environments and show that alpha entanglement codes are flexible and practical codes. Remarkably, they excel at code locality, hence, they reduce repair costs and become less dependent on storage locations with poor availability. Our solution outperforms Reed-Solomon codes in many disaster recovery scenarios.Comment: The publication has 12 pages and 13 figures. This work was partially supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF Doc.Mobility 162014, 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN

Content-access QoS in peer-to-peer networks using a fast MDS erasure code

This paper describes an enhancement of content access Quality of Service in peer to peer (P2P) networks. The main idea is to use an erasure code to distribute the information over the peers. This distribution increases the users’ choice on disseminated encoded data and therefore statistically enhances the overall throughput of the transfer. A performance evaluation based on an original model using the results of a measurement campaign of sequential and parallel downloads in a real P2P network over Internet is presented. Based on a bandwidth distribution, statistical content-access QoS are guaranteed in function of both the content replication level in the network and the file dissemination strategies. A simple application in the context of media streaming is proposed. Finally, the constraints on the erasure code related to the proposed system are analysed and a new fast MDS erasure code is proposed, implemented and evaluated

The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable

Security Framework for Decentralized Shared Calendars

International audienceWe propose a security framework for Decentralized Shared Calendar. The proposed security framework provides confidentiality to replicated shared calendar events and secures the commu- nication between users. It is designed in such a way that DeSCal preserves all of its characteristic features like fault-tolerance, crash recovery, availability and dynamic access control. It has been implemented on iPhone OS.Nous proposons un protocole de sécurité pour des agendas partagés dont la gestion de données est complètement décentralisée. Dans ce protocole, nous assurons à la fois (i) la confidentialité du contenu répliqué et (ii) la sécurité de communication entre les utilisateurs. Comme nous utilisons une réplication complête de données, notre protocole préserve toutes les caractéristiques d'une telle réplication, à savoir : la tolérance aux pannes et la reprise après panne. Pour valider notre solution, nous avons implémenté un prototype sur des mobiles tournant sous le système iPhone OS

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200