E-Control: First Public Release of Remote Control Software for VLBI Telescopes

Automating and remotely controlling observations are important for future operations in a Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS). At the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell, in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, a software extension to the existing NASA Field System has been developed for remote control. It uses the principle of a remotely accessible, autonomous process cell as a server extension for the Field System. The communication is realized for low transfer rates using Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). It uses generative programming with the interface software generator idl2rpc.pl developed at Wettzell. The user interacts with this system over a modern graphical user interface created with wxWidgets. For security reasons the communication is automatically tunneled through a Secure Shell (SSH) session to the telescope. There are already successful test observations with the telescopes at O Higgins, Concepcion, and Wettzell. At Wettzell the software is already used routinely for weekend observations. Therefore the first public release of the software is now available, which will also be useful for other telescopes

CyberLiveApp: a secure sharing and migration approach for live virtual desktop applications in a cloud environment

In recent years we have witnessed the rapid advent of cloud computing, in which the remote software is delivered as a service and accessed by users using a thin client over the Internet. In particular, the traditional desktop application can execute in the remote virtual machines without re-architecture providing a personal desktop experience to users through remote display technologies. However, existing cloud desktop applications mainly achieve isolation environments using virtual machines (VMs), which cannot adequately support application-oriented collaborations between multiple users and VMs. In this paper, we propose a flexible collaboration approach, named CyberLiveApp, to enable live virtual desktop applications sharing based on a cloud and virtualization infrastructure. The CyberLiveApp supports secure application sharing and on-demand migration among multiple users or equipment. To support VM desktop sharing among multiple users, a secure access mechanism is developed to distinguish view privileges allowing window operation events to be tracked to compute hidden window areas in real time. A proxy-based window filtering mechanism is also proposed to deliver desktops to different users. To support application sharing and migration between VMs, we use the presentation streaming redirection mechanism and VM cloning service. These approaches have been preliminary evaluated on an extended MetaVNC. Results of evaluations have verified that these approaches are effective and useful

RADIS: Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trustworthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an interoperable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trustworthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

A metaobject architecture for fault-tolerant distributed systems : the FRIENDS approach

The FRIENDS system developed at LAAS-CNRS is a metalevel architecture providing libraries of metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication, and group-based distributed applications. The use of metaobjects provides a nice separation of concerns between mechanisms and applications. Metaobjects can be used transparently by applications and can be composed according to the needs of a given application, a given architecture, and its underlying properties. In FRIENDS, metaobjects are used recursively to add new properties to applications. They are designed using an object oriented design method and implemented on top of basic system services. This paper describes the FRIENDS software-based architecture, the object-oriented development of metaobjects, the experiments that we have done, and summarizes the advantages and drawbacks of a metaobject approach for building fault-tolerant system

Quire: Lightweight Provenance for Smart Phone Operating Systems

Smartphone apps often run with full privileges to access the network and sensitive local resources, making it difficult for remote systems to have any trust in the provenance of network connections they receive. Even within the phone, different apps with different privileges can communicate with one another, allowing one app to trick another into improperly exercising its privileges (a Confused Deputy attack). In Quire, we engineered two new security mechanisms into Android to address these issues. First, we track the call chain of IPCs, allowing an app the choice of operating with the diminished privileges of its callers or to act explicitly on its own behalf. Second, a lightweight signature scheme allows any app to create a signed statement that can be verified anywhere inside the phone. Both of these mechanisms are reflected in network RPCs, allowing remote systems visibility into the state of the phone when an RPC is made. We demonstrate the usefulness of Quire with two example applications. We built an advertising service, running distinctly from the app which wants to display ads, which can validate clicks passed to it from its host. We also built a payment service, allowing an app to issue a request which the payment service validates with the user. An app cannot not forge a payment request by directly connecting to the remote server, nor can the local payment service tamper with the request

FRIENDS - A flexible architecture for implementing fault tolerant and secure distributed applications

FRIENDS is a software-based architecture for implementing fault-tolerant and, to some extent, secure applications. This architecture is composed of sub-systems and libraries of metaobjects. Transparency and separation of concerns is provided not only to the application programmer but also to the programmers implementing metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication and distribution. Common services required for implementing metaobjects are provided by the sub-systems. Metaobjects are implemented using object-oriented techniques and can be reused and customised according to the application needs, the operational environment and its related fault assumptions. Flexibility is increased by a recursive use of metaobjects. Examples and experiments are also described

Distributed operating systems

In the past five years, distributed operating systems research has gone through a consolidation phase. On a large number of design issues there is now considerable consensus between different research groups.\ud \ud In this paper, an overview of recent research in distributed systems is given. In turn, the paper discusses overall system structure, protection issues, file system designs, problems and solutions for fault tolerance and a mechanism that is rapidly becoming very important for efficient distributed systems design: hints.\ud \ud An attempt was made to provide sufficient references to interesting research projects for the reader to find material for more detailed study