CSE590L/S: Networks/systems seminar, Fall '09

Mondays at 1:30pm
EEB 042

In the 590L slot this quarter, we'll be running the seminar the "usual" way by discussing research papers and having the occasional guest lecture. For this quarter, our paper theme is trusted computing hardware, software techniques and applications.

Note that we will hold our first (organizational) meeting during the 590S slot on Wednesday, October 7th, at 1:30pm also in EEB042.

Schedule
Wed Oct. 7: organizational meeting in 590S slot, 1:30pm in EEB 042
Mon Oct. 12: no seminar (SOSP)
Mon Oct. 19: Mike Piatek HotNets practice talk ("Pitfalls for ISP-friendly P2P design")
Mon Oct. 26: David Richardson Chapter 2 of Reducing the Trusted Computing Base for Applications on Commodity Systems (Ph.D. Thesis of Jonathan M. McCune, CMU).

Bootstrapping Trust in a "Trusted" Platform, Bryan Parno. HotSec 2008

Mon Nov. 2: Matt Welsh (Harvard University)


Note: this lecture will be in CSE403

Resource Aware Programming for Sensor Networks
CSE403, 1:30-2:30pm

Sensor networks have taken off, though tuning them to achieve good resource efficiency is difficult. Our group has deployed sensor networks for volcano monitoring and rehabilitation medicine, and each time we find that tuning parameters to achieve the right tradeoff in terms of data quality, battery lifetime, and bandwidth usage is quite painful. To make things worse, resource availability fluctuates over time, as does the load that the application places on those resources. The severely constrained and decentralized nature of sensor networks makes this problem fairly challenging.

In this talk, I argue that the software for sensor networks should be designed around the fundamental abstraction of resource-aware programming. In this model, the application has direct visibility and control over resources as a first-class primitive. This requires the application code to take responsibility for its own resource management decisions, since it cannot expect a "bailout" from the OS. This approach enables much more effective adaptations to changing conditions, and supports a rich space of resource-management policies.

I will present three related systems that leverage this approach: Pixie, a new sensor node operating system; Lance, a network-wide resource management plane; and Mercury, a platform for maximizing data quality in a wearable sensor network. I will present examples and evaluations based on our real-world deployments.

Mon Nov. 9: Colin Dixon SecVisor: A Tiny Hypervisor to Provide Lifetime Kernel Code Integrity for Commodity OSes, by Seshadri et al., SOSP 2007.
Mon Nov. 16: Paul Leach (Microsoft) application identity and AppLocker in Windows 7
Mon Nov. 23: Mark Zbikowski Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization, by McCune et al., EuroSys 2008.
Mon Nov. 30: John John Not-a-Bot (NAB): Improving Service Availability in the Face of Botnet Attacks, by Ramakrishna Gummadi et al., NSDI 2009.

Safe Passage for Passwords and Other Sensitive Data, by McCune et al., NDSS 2009.

Mon Dec. 7: Tomas Isdal Security BGP Using External Security Monitors, by Reynolds et al., Cornell technical report.