Applying the dynamics of evolution to achieve reliability in master-worker computing

We consider Internet-based master-worker task computations, such as SETI@home, where a master process sends tasks, across the Internet, to worker processes; workers execute and report back some result. However, these workers are not trustworthy, and it might be at their best interest to report incorrect results. In such master-worker computations, the behavior and the best interest of the workers might change over time. We model such computations using evolutionary dynamics, and we study the conditions under which the master can reliably obtain task results. In particular, we develop and analyze an algorithmic mechanism based on reinforcement learning to provide workers with the necessary incentives to eventually become truthful. Our analysis identifies the conditions under which truthful behavior can be ensured and bounds the expected convergence time to that behavior. The analysis is complemented with illustrative simulations.This work is supported by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation grant TΠE/ΠΛHPO/0609(BE)/05, the National Science Foundation (CCF-0937829, CCF-1114930), Comunidad de Madrid grants S2009TIC-1692 and MODELICO-CM, Spanish PRODIEVO and RESINEE grants and MICINN grant EC2011-29688-C02-01, and National Natural Science Foundation of China grant 61020106002.Publicad

Exploiting the network for securing personal devices

Personal devices (such as smartphones and laptops) often experience incoherent levels of security due to the different protection applications available on the various devices. This paper presents a novel approach that consists in offloading security applications from personal devices and relocating them inside the network; this will be achieved by enriching network devices with the appropriate computational capabilities to execute generic security applications. This approach is fostered by the Secured project, which will define the architecture, data and protocols needed to turn this vision into reality

Achieving Reliability in Master-worker Computing via Evolutionary Dynamics

The proceeding at: 18th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Euro-Par 2012), took place 2012, August 27-31, in Rhodes Island, Greece.This work considers Internet-based task computations in which a master process assigns tasks, over the Internet, to rational workers and collect their responses. The objective is for the master to obtain the correct task outcomes. For this purpose we formulate and study the dynamics of evolution of Internet-based master-worker computations through reinforcement learning.This work is supported by the Cyprus Research Promo-tion Foundation grant TΠE/ΠΛHPO/0609(BE)/05, NSF grants CCF-0937829, CCF-1114930, Comunidad de Madrid grant S2009TIC-1692, Spanish MOSAICO and RESINEE grants and MICINN grant TEC2011-29688-C02-01, and National Natural Science Foundation of China grant 61020106002.Publicad

Chapter Securing the Home Energy Management Platform

Recently, many efforts have been done to chemically functionalize sensors surface to achieve selectivity towards diagnostics targets, such as DNA, RNA fragments and protein tumoural biomarkers, through the surface immobilization of the related specific receptor. Especially, some kind of sensors such as microcantilevers (gravimetric sensors) and one-dimensional photonics crystals (optical sensors) able to couple Bloch surface waves are very sensitive. Thus, any kind of surface modifications devoted to functionalize them has to be finely controlled in terms of mass and optical characteristics, such as refractive index, to minimize the perturbation, on the transduced signal, that can affect the response sensitivity towards the detected target species

Practical assessment of Biba integrity for TCG-enabled platforms

Checking the integrity of an application is necessary to determine if the latter will behave as expected. The method defined by the Trusted Computing Group consists in evaluating the fingerprints of the platform hardware and software components required for the proper functioning of the application to be assessed. However, this only ensures that a process was working correctly at load-time but not for its whole life-cycle. Policy-Reduced Integrity Measurement Architecture (PRIMA) addresses this problem by enforcing a security policy that denies information flows from potentially malicious processes to an application target of the evaluation and its dependencies (requirement introduced by CW-Lite, an evolution of the Biba integrity model). Given the difficulty of deploying PRIMA (as platform administrators have to tune their security policies to satisfy the CW-Lite requirements) we propose in this paper Enhanced IMA, an extended version of the Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) that, unlike PRIMA, works almost out of the box and just reports information flows instead of enforcing them. In addition, we introduce a model to evaluate the information reported by Enhanced IMA with existing technique

ALGORITHMIZATION, REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS AND ARCHITECTURAL CHALLENGES OF TRACONDA

Globally, there are so much information security threats on Internet that even when data is encrypted, there is no guarantee that copy would not be available to third-party, and eventually be decrypted. Thus, trusted routing mechanism that inhibits availability of (encrypted or not) data being transferred to third-party is proposed in this paper. Algorithmization, requirements analysis and architectural challenges for its development are presented