Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management

An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time, low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog

Découverte et allocation des ressources pour le traitement de requêtes dans les systèmes grilles

De nos jours, les systèmes Grille, grâce à leur importante capacité de calcul et de stockage ainsi que leur disponibilité, constituent l'un des plus intéressants environnements informatiques. Dans beaucoup de différents domaines, on constate l'utilisation fréquente des facilités que les environnements Grille procurent. Le traitement des requêtes distribuées est l'un de ces domaines où il existe de grandes activités de recherche en cours, pour transférer l'environnement sous-jacent des systèmes distribués et parallèles à l'environnement Grille. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur la découverte des ressources et des algorithmes d'allocation de ressources pour le traitement des requêtes dans les environnements Grille. Pour ce faire, nous proposons un algorithme de découverte des ressources pour le traitement des requêtes dans les systèmes Grille en introduisant le contrôle de topologie auto-stabilisant et l'algorithme de découverte des ressources dirigé par l'élection convergente. Ensuite, nous présentons un algorithme d'allocation des ressources, qui réalise l'allocation des ressources pour les requêtes d'opérateur de jointure simple par la génération d'un espace de recherche réduit pour les nœuds candidats et en tenant compte des proximités des candidats aux sources de données. Nous présentons également un autre algorithme d'allocation des ressources pour les requêtes d'opérateurs de jointure multiple. Enfin, on propose un algorithme d'allocation de ressources, qui apporte une tolérance aux pannes lors de l'exécution de la requête par l'utilisation de la réplication passive d'opérateurs à état. La contribution générale de cette thèse est double. Premièrement, nous proposons un nouvel algorithme de découverte de ressource en tenant compte des caractéristiques des environnements Grille. Nous nous adressons également aux problèmes d'extensibilité et de dynamicité en construisant une topologie efficace sur l'environnement Grille et en utilisant le concept d'auto-stabilisation, et par la suite nous adressons le problème de l'hétérogénéité en proposant l'algorithme de découverte de ressources dirigé par l'élection convergente. La deuxième contribution de cette thèse est la proposition d'un nouvel algorithme d'allocation des ressources en tenant compte des caractéristiques de l'environnement Grille. Nous abordons les problèmes causés par la grande échelle caractéristique en réduisant l'espace de recherche pour les ressources candidats. De ce fait nous réduisons les coûts de communication au cours de l'exécution de la requête en allouant des nœuds au plus près des sources de données. Et enfin nous traitons la dynamicité des nœuds, du point de vue de leur existence dans le système, en proposant un algorithme d'affectation des ressources avec une tolérance aux pannes.Grid systems are today's one of the most interesting computing environments because of their large computing and storage capabilities and their availability. Many different domains profit the facilities of grid environments. Distributed query processing is one of these domains in which there exists large amounts of ongoing research to port the underlying environment from distributed and parallel systems to the grid environment. In this thesis, we focus on resource discovery and resource allocation algorithms for query processing in grid environments. For this, we propose resource discovery algorithm for query processing in grid systems by introducing self-stabilizing topology control and converge-cast based resource discovery algorithms. Then, we propose a resource allocation algorithm, which realizes allocation of resources for single join operator queries by generating a reduced search space for the candidate nodes and by considering proximities of candidates to the data sources. We also propose another resource allocation algorithm for queries with multiple join operators. Lastly, we propose a fault-tolerant resource allocation algorithm, which provides fault-tolerance during the execution of the query by the use of passive replication of stateful operators. The general contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, we propose a new resource discovery algorithm by considering the characteristics of the grid environments. We address scalability and dynamicity problems by constructing an efficient topology over the grid environment using the self-stabilization concept; and we deal with the heterogeneity problem by proposing the converge-cast based resource discovery algorithm. The second main contribution of this thesis is the proposition of a new resource allocation algorithm considering the characteristics of the grid environment. We tackle the scalability problem by reducing the search space for candidate resources. We decrease the communication costs during the query execution by allocating nodes closer to the data sources. And finally we deal with the dynamicity of nodes, in terms of their existence in the system, by proposing the fault-tolerant resource allocation algorithm

Location based services in wireless ad hoc networks

In this dissertation, we investigate location based services in wireless ad hoc networks from four different aspects - i) location privacy in wireless sensor networks (privacy), ii) end-to-end secure communication in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks (security), iii) quality versus latency trade-off in content retrieval under ad hoc node mobility (performance) and iv) location clustering based Sybil attack detection in vehicular ad hoc networks (trust). The first contribution of this dissertation is in addressing location privacy in wireless sensor networks. We propose a non-cooperative sensor localization algorithm showing how an external entity can stealthily invade into the location privacy of sensors in a network. We then design a location privacy preserving tracking algorithm for defending against such adversarial localization attacks. Next we investigate secure end-to-end communication in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks. Here, due to lack of control on sensors\u27 locations post deployment, pre-fixing pairwise keys between sensors is not feasible especially under larger scale random deployments. Towards this premise, we propose differentiated key pre-distribution for secure end-to-end secure communication, and show how it improves existing routing algorithms. Our next contribution is in addressing quality versus latency trade-off in content retrieval under ad hoc node mobility. We propose a two-tiered architecture for efficient content retrieval in such environment. Finally we investigate Sybil attack detection in vehicular ad hoc networks. A Sybil attacker can create and use multiple counterfeit identities risking trust of a vehicular ad hoc network, and then easily escape the location of the attack avoiding detection. We propose a location based clustering of nodes leveraging vehicle platoon dispersion for detection of Sybil attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks --Abstract, page iii

Distributed virtual environment scalability and security

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have been an active area of research and engineering for more than 20 years. The most widely deployed DVEs are network games such as Quake, Halo, and World of Warcraft (WoW), with millions of users and billions of dollars in annual revenue. Deployed DVEs remain expensive centralized implementations despite significant research outlining ways to distribute DVE workloads. This dissertation shows previous DVE research evaluations are inconsistent with deployed DVE needs. Assumptions about avatar movement and proximity - fundamental scale factors - do not match WoW’s workload, and likely the workload of other deployed DVEs. Alternate workload models are explored and preliminary conclusions presented. Using realistic workloads it is shown that a fully decentralized DVE cannot be deployed to today’s consumers, regardless of its overhead. Residential broadband speeds are improving, and this limitation will eventually disappear. When it does, appropriate security mechanisms will be a fundamental requirement for technology adoption. A trusted auditing system (“Carbon”) is presented which has good security, scalability, and resource characteristics for decentralized DVEs. When performing exhaustive auditing, Carbon adds 27% network overhead to a decentralized DVE with a WoW-like workload. This resource consumption can be reduced significantly, depending upon the DVE’s risk tolerance. Finally, the Pairwise Random Protocol (PRP) is described. PRP enables adversaries to fairly resolve probabilistic activities, an ability missing from most decentralized DVE security proposals. Thus, this dissertations contribution is to address two of the obstacles for deploying research on decentralized DVE architectures. First, lack of evidence that research results apply to existing DVEs. Second, the lack of security systems combining appropriate security guarantees with acceptable overhead

Industrial Internet of Things based Collaborative Sensing Intelligence: Framework and Research Challenges

The development of an efficient and cost-effective solution to solve a complex problem (e.g., dynamic detection of toxic gases) is an important research issue in the industrial applications of Internet of Things (IoT). An industrial intelligent ecosystem enables the collection of massive data from the various devices (e.g., sensor-embedded wireless devices) dynamically collaborating with humans. Effectively collaborative analytics based on the collected massive data from humans and devices is quite essential to improve the efficiency of industrial production/service. In this study, we propose a Collaborative Sensing Intelligence (CSI) framework, combining collaborative intelligence and industrial sensing intelligence. The proposed CSI facilitates the cooperativity of analytics with integrating massive spatio-temporal data from different sources and time points. To deploy the CSI for achieving intelligent and efficient industrial production/service, the key challenges and open issues are discussed as well