Semantic-free referencing in linked systems

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45).The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures--the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the ill-fated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this thesis describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).by Michael Walfish.S.M

The AliEn system, status and perspectives

AliEn is a production environment that implements several components of the Grid paradigm needed to simulate, reconstruct and analyse HEP data in a distributed way. The system is built around Open Source components, uses the Web Services model and standard network protocols to implement the computing platform that is currently being used to produce and analyse Monte Carlo data at over 30 sites on four continents. The aim of this paper is to present the current AliEn architecture and outline its future developments in the light of emerging standards.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, Word, 10 figures. PSN MOAT00

Providing public key certificate authorization and policy with DNS

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) instills trust in certificates commonly used to secure email, web traffic, VPNs, file transfers, and other forms of network communication. Due to a number of successful attacks against certificate authorities, malicious parties have illegitimately acquired trusted certificates for widely used online services, government agencies, and other important organizations. These incidents, and the potential for future attacks of a similar nature, present notable risk to PKI and global security as a whole. The proposed Certificate Policy Framework (CPF) offers a mechanism for organizations to control which certificates are authorized to authenticate their services. This DNS-based protocol allows organizations to publish an access control list for any given hostname, where each entry in the ACL identifies a certificate and indicates whether the certificate should be blocked, warned upon, or permitted. Similarly, any CPF-compatible application can query DNS for CPF records to verify the integrity of the certificate from an authoritative viewpoint. In this work, we review limitations in PKI and certificate-based security and review existing work in this area. We will also discuss CPF in greater detail and demonstrate how it can be used to augment PKI to strengthen this widely adopted technology

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration