Bankrupt Covert Channel: Turning Network Predictability into Vulnerability

Recent years have seen a surge in the number of data leaks despite aggressive information-containment measures deployed by cloud providers. When attackers acquire sensitive data in a secure cloud environment, covert communication channels are a key tool to exfiltrate the data to the outside world. While the bulk of prior work focused on covert channels within a single CPU, they require the spy (transmitter) and the receiver to share the CPU, which might be difficult to achieve in a cloud environment with hundreds or thousands of machines. This work presents Bankrupt, a high-rate highly clandestine channel that enables covert communication between the spy and the receiver running on different nodes in an RDMA network. In Bankrupt, the spy communicates with the receiver by issuing RDMA network packets to a private memory region allocated to it on a different machine (an intermediary). The receiver similarly allocates a separate memory region on the same intermediary, also accessed via RDMA. By steering RDMA packets to a specific set of remote memory addresses, the spy causes deep queuing at one memory bank, which is the finest addressable internal unit of main memory. This exposes a timing channel that the receiver can listen on by issuing probe packets to addresses mapped to the same bank but in its own private memory region. Bankrupt channel delivers 74Kb/s throughput in CloudLab's public cloud while remaining undetectable to the existing monitoring capabilities, such as CPU and NIC performance counters.Comment: Published in WOOT 2020 co-located with USENIX Security 202

Benchmarking, Analysis, and Optimization of Serverless Function Snapshots

Serverless computing has seen rapid adoption due to its high scalability and flexible, pay-as-you-go billing model. In serverless, developers structure their services as a collection of functions, sporadically invoked by various events like clicks. High inter-arrival time variability of function invocations motivates the providers to start new function instances upon each invocation, leading to significant cold-start delays that degrade user experience. To reduce cold-start latency, the industry has turned to snapshotting, whereby an image of a fully-booted function is stored on disk, enabling a faster invocation compared to booting a function from scratch. This work introduces vHive, an open-source framework for serverless experimentation with the goal of enabling researchers to study and innovate across the entire serverless stack. Using vHive, we characterize a state-of-the-art snapshot-based serverless infrastructure, based on industry-leading Containerd orchestration framework and Firecracker hypervisor technologies. We find that the execution time of a function started from a snapshot is 95% higher, on average, than when the same function is memory-resident. We show that the high latency is attributable to frequent page faults as the function's state is brought from disk into guest memory one page at a time. Our analysis further reveals that functions access the same stable working set of pages across different invocations of the same function. By leveraging this insight, we build REAP, a light-weight software mechanism for serverless hosts that records functions' stable working set of guest memory pages and proactively prefetches it from disk into memory. Compared to baseline snapshotting, REAP slashes the cold-start delays by 3.7x, on average.Comment: To appear in ASPLOS 202

Pollen and Isotope Investigations of an Ice Core from Vavilov Ice Cap, October Revolution Island, Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago, Russia

The Vavilov Ice Cap (79°27'N, 95° 21'E) was cored during February and March of 1988. The corer passed through 457.18 m of glacier ice, 2.15 m of moraine-containing ice, and 2.28 m of underlying rocks. Structural-stratigraphical and isotope analysis show the glacier ice is of Holocene in age; the ice layer covered by frozen deposits is Pleistocene glacier ice; and the ground (ice wedge?) ice from underlying sediments was formed during the Last Interglacial. Palynological studies of this core, carried out for the first time in the Russian Arctic demonstrate that the pollen spectra have a unique pattern. It reduces the possibility of correlation between the Vavilov Ice Cape spectra and pollen spectra from other surficial deposits, because the ice retains pollen and spores brought from enormous distances. Only the upper 65 m of the core is easily dated, to the last millennium, by the presence of cereals, Plantago lanceolata, Centaurea cyanus, Cannabis pollen. That is in good agreement with the model of age distribution based upon depth. The presence of considerable amounts of Tilia cordifolia pollen, a West-European species in the upper layers suggests that summer air masses have been dominantly from the southwest during the last 500 years. The pollen data do not contradict the conclusion the Vavilov ice core is composed of a section of Holocene ice, moraine-containing ice representing the Pleistocene episode, and a ground ice formed during an earlier warm period (Last Interglacial?).Une carotte de glace prélevée en 1988 au sein de la calotte glaciaire de Vavilov (79°27'N, 95°21'E) a fait l'objet d'analyses isotopiques et palynologiques. Le sondage comprend 457,18 m de glace « pure », suivis de 2,15 m de glace chargée de sédiments et 2,28 m de roches gelés du socle. Les résultats des analyses structurales, stratigraphiques et isotopiques sont les suivants : la glace pure datée de l'Holocène, les 2,15 de la couche chargée de sédiments datent du Pléistocène, tandis que la glace présente dans les fentes du socle s'est formée au cours du dernier interglaciaire. Les spectres polliniques de cette carotte sont caractérisés par des grains de pollen d'origine lointaine préservés dans la glace. Cette constatation réduit grandement les possibilités de corrélation avec les données sédimentaires de la région, qui reflètent la composition de la végétation locale. Un âge inférieur à 1000 ans peut être attribué aux 65 m supérieurs de la carotte en raison de la présence de pollen de céréales, de Plantago lanceolata, Centaurea cyanus et de Cannabis. Cette interprétation concorde avec le modèle du taux d'accumulation de la glace. Dans la partie supérieure de la carotte, la présence en quantité considérable de Tilia cordifolia, une espèce de tilleul d'Europe de l'Ouest, laisse supposer que les masses d'air en provenance du sud-ouest ont prédominé au cours des étés des 500 dernières années. En conclusion, les données palynologiques ne contredisent pas les résultats antérieurs selon lesquels la carotte glaciaire étudiée couvre une partie de l'Holocène, que la glace contenant la moraine représente l'épisode du Pléistocène et que la glace du socle se soit formée pendant une période chaude (le dernier interglaciaire?)

On Surgical Fine-tuning for Language Encoders

Fine-tuning all the layers of a pre-trained neural language encoder (either using all the parameters or using parameter-efficient methods) is often the de-facto way of adapting it to a new task. We show evidence that for different downstream language tasks, fine-tuning only a subset of layers is sufficient to obtain performance that is close to and often better than fine-tuning all the layers in the language encoder. We propose an efficient metric based on the diagonal of the Fisher information matrix (FIM score), to select the candidate layers for selective fine-tuning. We show, empirically on GLUE and SuperGLUE tasks and across distinct language encoders, that this metric can effectively select layers leading to a strong downstream performance. Our work highlights that task-specific information corresponding to a given downstream task is often localized within a few layers, and tuning only those is sufficient for strong performance. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of the FIM score to rank layers in a manner that remains constant during the optimization process.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202

Experts on Resistance to Reorganization of Structure and Technologies of Urban Mobility Provision in Russia: Challenges, Reasons, Solutions and Prospects

In 2022 a lot has changed in the Russian transport system. Today the urban transport systems of Russian cities are staying at the bifurcation point – they are awaiting serious changes. Therefore, it was interesting to investigate expert opinions of specialists on the prospects of the development of urban mobility provision technologies in Russia and possible changes in the current structure of citizens’ transportation approaches. The paper gives results of the research of opinions of transport market specialists on the issues of the probability of the shift of the current paradigm of transport services in Tyumen (a large Russian city with a population of 828.5 thousand people) and the necessity of reorganization of the structure and technologies of urban mobility provision due to the withdrawal of foreign automakers from the Russian market. The article presents the comparison of opinions between Tyumen professionals in the transport market and ordinary Russian citizens. The main conclusion of the research considers the serious resistance of the public environment to the expected reorganization of the structure and technologies of urban mobility provision in Russia

On the possibility of reducing man-made burden on benthic biotic communities when mining solid minerals using technical means of various designs

The paper analyses features of the species composition and diversity of biotic communities living within the ferromanganese nodule fields (the Clarion-Clipperton field), cobalt-manganese crusts (the Magellan Seamounts) and deep-sea polymetallic sulphides (the Ashadze-1, Ashadze-2, Logatchev and Krasnov fields) in the Russian exploration areas of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Prospects of mining solid minerals of the world’s oceans with the least possible damage to the marine ecosystems are considered that cover formation of the sediment plumes and roiling of significant volumes of water as a result of collecting the minerals as well as conservation of the hydrothermal fauna and microbiota, including in the impact zone of high temperature hydrothermal vents. Different concepts and layout options for deep-water mining complexes (the Indian and Japanese concepts as well as those of the Nautilus Minerals and Saint Petersburg Mining University) are examined with respect to their operational efficiency. The main types of mechanisms that are part of the complexes are identified and assessed based on the defined priorities that include the ecological aspect, i.e. the impact on the seabed environment; manufacturing and operating costs; and specific energy consumption, i.e. the technical and economic indicators. The presented morphological analysis gave grounds to justify the layout of a deep-sea minerals collecting unit, i.e. a device with suction chambers and a grip arm walking gear, selected based on the environmental key priority. Pilot experimental studies of physical and mechanical properties of cobalt-manganese crust samples were performed through application of bilateral axial force using spherical balls (indenters) and producing a rock strength passport to assess further results of the experimental studies. Experimental destructive tests of the cobalt-manganese crust by impact and cutting were carried out to determine the impact load and axial cutting force required for implementation of the collecting system that uses a clamshell-type effector with a built-in impactor