Using Replication and Partitioning to Build Secure Distributed Systems

A challenging unsolved security problem is how to specify and enforce system-wide security policies; this problem is even more acute in distributed systems with mutual distrust. This paper describes a way to enforce policies for data confidentiality and integrity in such an environment. Programs annotated with security specifications are statically checked and then transformed by the compiler to run securely on a distributed system with untrusted hosts. The code and data of the computation are partitioned across the available hosts in accordance with the security specification. The key contribution is automatic replication of code and data to increase assurance of integrity—without harming confidentiality, and without placing undue trust in any host. The compiler automatically generates secure run-time protocols for communication among the replicated code partitions. Results are given from a prototype implementation applied to various distributed programs

Automatic partitioning of database applications

Database-backed applications are nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives. Applications that make many small accesses to the database create two challenges for developers: increased latency and wasted resources from numerous network round trips. A well-known technique to improve transactional database application performance is to convert part of the application into stored procedures that are executed on the database server. Unfortunately, this conversion is often difficult. In this paper we describe Pyxis, a system that takes database-backed applications and automatically partitions their code into two pieces, one of which is executed on the application server and the other on the database server. Pyxis profiles the application and server loads, statically analyzes the code's dependencies, and produces a partitioning that minimizes the number of control transfers as well as the amount of data sent during each transfer. Our experiments using TPC-C and TPC-W show that Pyxis is able to generate partitions with up to 3x reduction in latency and 1.7x improvement in throughput when compared to a traditional non-partitioned implementation and has comparable performance to that of a custom stored procedure implementation.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

EFFICIENT RUNTIME SECURITY SYSTEM FOR DECENTRALISED DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Distributed systems can be defined as systems that are scattered over geographical distances and provide different activities through communication, processing, data transfer and so on. Thus, increasing the cooperation, efficiency, and reliability to deal with users and data resources jointly. For this reason, distributed systems have been shown to be a promising infrastructure for most applications in the digital world. Despite their advantages, keeping these systems secure, is a complex task because of the unconventional nature of distributed systems which can produce many security problems like phishing, denial of services or eavesdropping. Therefore, adopting security and privacy policies in distributed systems will increase the trustworthiness between the users and these systems. However, adding or updating security is considered one of the most challenging concerns and this relies on various security vulnerabilities which existing in distributed systems. The most significant one is inserting or modifying a new security concern or even removing it according to the security status which may appear at runtime. Moreover, these problems will be exacerbated when the system adopts the multi-hop concept as a way to deal with transmitting and processing information. This can pose many significant security challenges especially if dealing with decentralized distributed systems and the security must be furnished as end-to-end. Unfortunately, existing solutions are insufficient to deal with these problems like CORBA which is considered a one-to-one relationship only, or DSAW which deals with end-to-end security but without taking into account the possibility of changing information sensitivity during runtime. This thesis provides a proposed mechanism for enforcing security policies and dealing with distributed systems’ security weakness in term of the software perspective. The proposed solution utilised Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), to address security concerns during compilation and running time. The proposed solution is based on a decentralized distributed system that adopts the multi-hop concept to deal with different requested tasks. The proposed system focused on how to achieve high accuracy, data integrity and high efficiency of the distributed system in real time. This is done through modularising the most efficient security solutions, Access Control and Cryptography, by using Aspect-Oriented Programming language. The experiments’ results show the proposed solution overcomes the shortage of the existing solutions by fully integrating with the decentralized distributed system to achieve dynamic, high cooperation, high performance and end-to-end holistic security

Using replication and partitioning to build secure distributed systems

A challenging unsolved security problem is how to specify and enforce system-wide security policies; this problem is even more acute in distributed systems with mutual distrust. This paper describes a way to enforce policies for data confidentiality and integrity in such an environment. Programs annotated with security specifications are statically checked and then transformed by the compiler to run securely on a distributed system with untrusted hosts. The code and data of the computation are partitioned across the available hosts in accordance with the security specification. The key contribution is automatic replication of code and data to increase assurance of integrity—without harming confidentiality, and without placing undue trust in any host. The compiler automatically generates secure run-time protocols for communication among the replicated code partitions. Results are given from a prototype implementation applied to various distributed programs.

Using replication and partitioning to build secure distributed systems

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