Energy Technology and Management

The civilization of present age is predominantly dependent on energy resources and their utilization. Almost every human activity in today's life needs one or other form of energy. As world's energy resources are not unlimited, it is extremely important to use energy efficiently. Both energy related technological issues and policy and planning paradigms are highly needed to effectively exploit and utilize energy resources. This book covers topics, ranging from technology to policy, relevant to efficient energy utilization. Those academic and practitioners who have background knowledge of energy issues can take benefit from this book

Discovering New Vulnerabilities in Computer Systems

Vulnerability research plays a key role in preventing and defending against malicious computer system exploitations. Driven by a multi-billion dollar underground economy, cyber criminals today tirelessly launch malicious exploitations, threatening every aspect of daily computing. to effectively protect computer systems from devastation, it is imperative to discover and mitigate vulnerabilities before they fall into the offensive parties\u27 hands. This dissertation is dedicated to the research and discovery of new design and deployment vulnerabilities in three very different types of computer systems.;The first vulnerability is found in the automatic malicious binary (malware) detection system. Binary analysis, a central piece of technology for malware detection, are divided into two classes, static analysis and dynamic analysis. State-of-the-art detection systems employ both classes of analyses to complement each other\u27s strengths and weaknesses for improved detection results. However, we found that the commonly seen design patterns may suffer from evasion attacks. We demonstrate attacks on the vulnerabilities by designing and implementing a novel binary obfuscation technique.;The second vulnerability is located in the design of server system power management. Technological advancements have improved server system power efficiency and facilitated energy proportional computing. However, the change of power profile makes the power consumption subjected to unaudited influences of remote parties, leaving the server systems vulnerable to energy-targeted malicious exploit. We demonstrate an energy abusing attack on a standalone open Web server, measure the extent of the damage, and present a preliminary defense strategy.;The third vulnerability is discovered in the application of server virtualization technologies. Server virtualization greatly benefits today\u27s data centers and brings pervasive cloud computing a step closer to the general public. However, the practice of physical co-hosting virtual machines with different security privileges risks introducing covert channels that seriously threaten the information security in the cloud. We study the construction of high-bandwidth covert channels via the memory sub-system, and show a practical exploit of cross-virtual-machine covert channels on virtualized x86 platforms

PC POWER MANAGEMENT BASED ON APPLICATION IDLE TIME AND POWER TRANSITIONING EVENT PROFILING

Green Information Technology (IT) has recently become one of the main focuses in research and practice. Its primary goal is to reduce or optimize power consumption, and to address the issue of large power wastage in many organizations. Computer power management is part of the green IT that can help to save computer power consumption. Consequently, it is helping organizations to increase profits and to reduce environmental impact. Thisresearch contributes to the green ITby proposing a mechanism to efficiently manage the computer power consumption through a computer power management application

Collaboration des équipements du réseau domestique pour une meilleure efficacité énergétique globale

In recent years, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has totally changed the people daily life in the Digital Home. Meanwhile, not only the amount of CO2 emission of ICT, so called ''footprint'', is increasing without cease, but also the price of electricity is constantly rising. Thus, it is quite important to reduce energy consumption in the home network and home devices for the environmental and economic reasons. In order to cope with this context, the thesis concerns the design, the evaluation, and the implementation of a novel set of mechanisms with the purpose of responding to home network energy consumption problems. We proposed firstly an Overlay Energy Control Network which is formed by the overlay energy control nodes. Each node is connected to one device which forms an overlay control network to coordinate the power states of the device. Then, a testbed for HOme Power Efficiency system (HOPE) is implemented to demonstrate the technical solution for energy control in a real home network environment with several frequently used scenarios. After analyzing user's way of use of their home network equipment, we propose a power management which controls the devices based on the analysis of the collaborative services. These frequently used collaborative services require different functional blocks in different devices. This model provides the possibility to turn on the right requested functional blocks in the right device at the right moment. Finally, based on the former contribution, the collaborative overlay power management offers several possible tradeoffs between the power consumption and the waiting delay in the home network.Au cours des dernières années, la révolution numérique a continué sa progression. Les technologies de l'information et des communications (TIC) ont totalement changé la vie quotidienne des gens à leur domicile (concept de « maison numérique »). Pendant ce temps, non seulement le volume des émissions de CO2 produit par les TIC, ce qu'on appelle l'empreinte carbone, est sans cesse en croissance mais elle s'accompagne également d'une hausse du prix de l'électricité, augmentant fortement la part des équipements numériques dans la budget global des ménages. Ainsi, pour des raisons environnementale et économique, réduire la consommation d'énergie dans les nombreux équipements du réseau domestique est devenu un enjeu majeur. Dans ce contexte, la thèse porte sur la conception, l'évaluation et la mise en œuvre d'un ensemble de mécanismes dans le but de répondre aux problèmes de consommation d'énergie sur les réseaux locaux rassemblant les équipements numériques domestiques. Nous proposons un réseau de contrôle qui est formé par des noeuds de contrôle de l'énergie placés au-dessus du réseau traditionnel. Chaque nœud de contrôle est relié à un dispositif en vue de coordonner les états d'alimentation de l'équipement domestique associé.. Un démonstrateur pour un système Home Power Efficiency (HOPE) a également été mis en œuvre. Il démontre la faisabilité de la solution technique que nous proposons pour le contrôle de l'énergie dans un réseau domestique réel avec des scénarios réels qui sont souvent utilisées par utilisateur. Après avoir analysé le mode d'utilisation des équipements du réseau domestique, nous proposons un système de gestion d'énergie qui contrôle ces équipements minimisant ainsi que leur consommation. Le système est basé sur l'analyse des services collaboratifs, chaque service est découpé en blocs fonctionnels atomiques, distribués dans les différents équipements. Cela permet de gérer avec plus de précision les besoins énergétiques de chaque équipement de manière à n'alimenter que les composants nécessaires au service demandé. Pour conclure ces travaux, nous avons également cherché à minimiser les impacts de l'économie d'énergie sur la qualité d'expérience perçue par l'utilisateur (notamment le délai d'activation des services). Nous proposons un système de gestion d'énergie pour des services collaboratifs offrant plusieurs compromis possibles entre la consommation d'énergie et le délai d'activation des services dans un réseau domestique. Il est complété par un algorithme d'apprentissage du comportement des utilisateurs domestiques

Architecture de sécurité de bout en bout et mécanismes d'autoprotection pour les environnements Cloud

Since several years the virtualization of infrastructures became one of the major research challenges, consuming less energy while delivering new services. However, many attacks hinder the global adoption of Cloud computing. Self-protection has recently raised growing interest as possible element of answer to the cloud computing infrastructure protection challenge. Yet, previous solutions fall at the last hurdle as they overlook key features of the cloud, by lack of flexible security policies, cross-layered defense, multiple control granularities, and open security architectures. This thesis presents VESPA, a self-protection architecture for cloud infrastructures. Flexible coordination between self-protection loops allows enforcing a rich spectrum of security strategies. A multi-plane extensible architecture also enables simple integration of commodity security components.Recently, some of the most powerful attacks against cloud computing infrastructures target the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). In many case, the main attack vector is a poorly confined device driver. Current architectures offer no protection against such attacks. This thesis proposes an altogether different approach by presenting KungFuVisor, derived from VESPA, a framework to build self-defending hypervisors. The result is a very flexible self-protection architecture, enabling to enforce dynamically a rich spectrum of remediation actions over different parts of the VMM, also facilitating defense strategy administration. We showed the application to three different protection scheme: virus infection, mobile clouds and hypervisor drivers. Indeed VESPA can enhance cloud infrastructure securityLa virtualisation des infrastructures est devenue un des enjeux majeurs dans la recherche, qui fournissent des consommations d'énergie moindres et des nouvelles opportunités. Face à de multiples menaces et des mécanismes de défense hétérogènes, l'approche autonomique propose une gestion simplifiée, robuste et plus efficace de la sécurité du cloud. Aujourd'hui, les solutions existantes s'adaptent difficilement. Il manque des politiques de sécurité flexibles, une défense multi-niveaux, des contrôles à granularité variable, ou encore une architecture de sécurité ouverte. Ce mémoire présente VESPA, une architecture d'autoprotection pour les infrastructures cloud. VESPA est construit autour de politiques qui peuvent réguler la sécurité à plusieurs niveaux. La coordination flexible entre les boucles d'autoprotection réalise un large spectre de stratégies de sécurité comme des détections et des réactions sur plusieurs niveaux. Une architecture extensible multi plans permet d'intégrer simplement des éléments déjà présents. Depuis peu, les attaques les plus critiques contre les infrastructures cloud visent la brique la plus sensible: l'hyperviseur. Le vecteur d'attaque principal est un pilote de périphérique mal confiné. Les mécanismes de défense mis en jeu sont statiques et difficile à gérer. Nous proposons une approche différente avec KungFuVisor, un canevas logiciel pour créer des hyperviseurs autoprotégés spécialisant l'architecture VESPA. Nous avons montré son application à trois types de protection différents : les attaques virales, la gestion hétérogène multi-domaines et l'hyperviseur. Ainsi la sécurité des infrastructures cloud peut être améliorée grâce à VESP

Ultra-reliable Low-latency, Energy-efficient and Computing-centric Software Data Plane for Network Softwarization

Network softwarization plays a significantly important role in the development and deployment of the latest communication system for 5G and beyond. A more flexible and intelligent network architecture can be enabled to provide support for agile network management, rapid launch of innovative network services with much reduction in Capital Expense (CAPEX) and Operating Expense (OPEX). Despite these benefits, 5G system also raises unprecedented challenges as emerging machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communication use cases require Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). According to empirical measurements performed by the author of this dissertation on a practical testbed, State of the Art (STOA) technologies and systems are not able to achieve the one millisecond end-to-end latency requirement of the 5G standard on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) servers. This dissertation performs a comprehensive introduction to three innovative approaches that can be used to improve different aspects of the current software-driven network data plane. All three approaches are carefully designed, professionally implemented and rigorously evaluated. According to the measurement results, these novel approaches put forward the research in the design and implementation of ultra-reliable low-latency, energy-efficient and computing-first software data plane for 5G communication system and beyond

Simulació i modelat d'entorns cloud per a experimentació amb machine learning

Nowadays Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most promising computer paradigms. The idea of selling software as a service has promoted IT enterprises to bet for this new paradigm. Cloud computing aims to power the next generation data centers not only offering software as a service but virtual services like hardware, data storage capacity or application logic. The increasing use of Cloud-based applications will also increase the power dedicated to the data centers that support this Clouds. Research in Cloud computing requires solutions that have to be tested in real environments. It is difficult and expensive to set up suitable test-beds for large scale cluster applications. Simulation can fulfill the needs that we find in Cloud computing experimentation. A large data center simulator can save lots of time and effort in Cloud investigation. This project presents the design and development process of some extensions to an existing virtualized data center simulator for Cloud computing research. It is able to reproduce the behaviour of a real Cloud framework and the information that it offers of the execution makes it suitable for testing and investigation purposes. The final idea of this project was to extend the heterogeneity of the tests that can be run by the simulator to use it as a test-bed for machine learning experimentation

Energy Efficiency in Communications and Networks

The topic of "Energy Efficiency in Communications and Networks" attracts growing attention due to economical and environmental reasons. The amount of power consumed by information and communication technologies (ICT) is rapidly increasing, as well as the energy bill of service providers. According to a number of studies, ICT alone is responsible for a percentage which varies from 2% to 10% of the world power consumption. Thus, driving rising cost and sustainability concerns about the energy footprint of the IT infrastructure. Energy-efficiency is an aspect that until recently was only considered for battery driven devices. Today we see energy-efficiency becoming a pervasive issue that will need to be considered in all technology areas from device technology to systems management. This book is seeking to provide a compilation of novel research contributions on hardware design, architectures, protocols and algorithms that will improve the energy efficiency of communication devices and networks and lead to a more energy proportional technology infrastructure