syslog
25Oct/110

proof of deletion

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

in between reading SOSP liveblogging notes, I'm still trying to think up how one might implement a "proof of deletion" service for cloud storage - here's the latest

a user stores data in the cloud - the data is encrypted so cloud provder cannot simply read it, but is amenable to privacy preserving queries on some keys.

the user wants to delete a record, contacts a third party (the grim reaper?), and gives then the keys of records. the third party tells the cloud service to delete the data. and then, using an anonymous service (via TOR etc) queries the record - they should get a 404 response.

of course, the cloud provider can squirrel data away but not in any useful way, as the TTP can do the query at any time

why ot just let the user run the query? well they might want to go away, and rely on the TTP who might also be persistent and might have bigger TOR guns....

30Sep/110

Photonics UK and Cyber Defense UK

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

Last couple of days I was in these two events

 

1.EPSRC Network of Networking 2 day workshop on Photoonics - see

http://www.commnet.ac.uk/node/34

 

Very interesting to see how coherent the UK's academic and industry photonics community are - they have a pretty clear roadmap for next 5 years and then some nice challenges - not a lot for CS (still) until they can do somethign cool in a) integration of optical links onto processors and b) build some more viable (in scale/integration/power terms) gates....but in terms of what they are doing for price/performance, they pretty much match Moore's law (terminating a 10GigE for 10 bucks is an amazing achievement!)

 

2. Rustat conference on UK Cybersecurity

http://www.cybersecurityforum2011.com/

 

This will almost certainly be blogged by Ross or someone else in the security group as they were there en masse. I chaired a session on UK skills and a couple of good outcomes were support from research counciles for more PhDs (whether this leads to money will remain to be seen) and

 

and the idea that CS graduates that end up on the Board as CIOs should make sure they have good business skills so they aren't looked down on by other board members as just a sort of uber "IT guy"...

 

Lots of very interesting corridor conversations. The UK gov budget in this space is 600M quid, so many SMEs scampering after it:) In general, we seem to be in ok shape (government policy doc on cybersecurity out soon, recent Chatam House report (can't find link right now) appareently less rosy, but still very useful. Expect to see more details here soon:

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/

 

We're having a NATO work shop on this in 10 days at Wolfson in Cambridge...Rex Hughes there is coordinating it with the Cambridge Science and Policy group.

Finally, I suggested a Homeopathic remedy for cyberattacks might be to dilute the stuxnet virus say 10^11 times in some random bits (e.g windows vista kernel code) and add it to your site.

 

Oh yeah and can someone tell me just what does the ICTKTN do?? :)

28Sep/110

IBM TCG Visit and Cambridge Networks Network

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

The last couple of days were busy - IBM visited en masse and their Technical consulting group of around 50 people showed up (in CMS) to talk about   various interesting topics - for me, the best one was a talk about financial service industry regulatory controls through risk data sharing (via a third party - a sort of nuclear test ban treaty assurance service) - very neat - lots of other good topics - Rolls Royce were also there - amusingly, IBM complimented Rolls on their reliable history (compared with the Software Industry) - i didn't feel it fair to mention the RB211 or the recent A380 shattered turbine:)

 

More locally crucual was the kickoff meeting of the Cambridge Networks Network - see http://www.cnn.group.cam.ac.uk/ for more info - the

This kickoff was to setup a cross group, grass roots movement to join up various people in systems biology, brain mapping, economics, eplidemiology (including plant sciences) and others to share common knowledge and methods/techniques for studying complex networked systems with interesting (e.g. emergent) phenomena - the kickoff was amibitious with talked from 5 people supposed to be 10 mins each (averaging 20 mins:)

 

some ideas i thought of while listening

 

1. weak ties (long links) in modular systems (social nets, the brain, the internet) serve the same purpose as random perturbations (like mutation) does in optimisation tools (like Genetic Algorithms or Simulated Annealing) - to get you out of local minima:- most GAs work by cross-over which implements parallel search in local areas of a fitness landscape (since similar genes share / cross over/breed and are succesful or not similarly) - I wonder if there is any literature on how graphs have a small (but non zero) fraction of "escape routes" from the highly interconnected/modular/cliqueish structure of a small world are slightyly more robust than purely hierarchical modular ones???

 

2nd thought was about epidemics (and economics) - the Vickers report on the banking sectore is basically quarantining domestic banks (building socieities) from the high risk (prostitution and drug user/gambling/casino) banking sector. on the other hand, sharing information problemly (see Efficient Markets) would also work (see IBM work above)

 

The difference is that a structural regulation is much easier to implement than a big bang transparent information regime. maybe we do one now, the other later - who knows?

 

The talk on Citrus Blight in Miami lemon trees was fun - reminded me plants (genetically) are a lot easier than animals (c.f. fluphone:)

 

The map of spread of the blight looked really like the map of the nuclear tests recently shown on youtube (see

for that (esp. for Anil:)

 

One nice name check was the work on neural structures and VLSI that showed Rent's Law applies to both - cute (but should we add weak ties to our multicore systems - one for Steve Furber maybe?)

 

Anyhow, this looks like a very good (young, active, enthusiastic, smart) initiative - they will be having a bi-weekly seminar series starting pretty soon - probably coordinated with the statslab's networking series....

(for people too young to recall, Rolls Royce actually went bankrupt in the 1970s trying to make carbon fiber turbine blades work - in the end, a government bailout fixed it, and they are ok - the problem they hit was the fibers in the original blades weren't knit in enough different directions - a prob,lem shared with the fiberglass bodywork o nthe Reliant Scimitar (and robin) which would shatter under fairly light impact into lots of dangeous shards. The solution is to sew 3 dimensions of fiber (much more expensve/complex, but immesnly strong, but also tunable for different flexibility in any given dimension) into the matrix - the recent A380 engine problem wasnt design, but manufacturing process...

1Jun/110

A Data Center in every Car

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

There's some people who have pointed out that electric cars will be dotted about our landscapes soon at charging piints (outside work, home, shops). This represents a great way to sink electricity that is being generated nearby (e.g. from microgenerators on houses) which would otherwise be wasted in long haul transmission or simply thrown away (if there's no easy affordable/deployable way to reverse the stream and send a lot of power up the electricity distribution network). THen when local demand picks up again (opposite end of the day) you just pull the power from the cars - Typical figures for the uk suggest 30% of electricty generated could be stored at any time, whch is a big change from current (pun intended) architectures.

 

But why not go one more step and distribute data centers to every car? then we could serve the world from the stored power when local data/processing demands are high. One should build a high speed wireless link (e.g. new wireless HDMI link can do 5-10Gbps) into every charging point, and put a petabyte of storage and a few terahz of multicore in each new car. That'd work well - 20M cars in the UK would dwarf what current data centers have and would have zero heat dissipation problems...

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1Jun/110

Safety in “numbers”?

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

Two projects wrapped up recently with highly successful final reviews in the European Commission's process - one is Trilogy, which we were tangentially involved in and mainly features some nifty work on multipath (TCP and IP).

 

The other was SocialNets which we were very involved in - what I wanted to post is that the partner at Eurecom in that project has now released a privacy preserving social networking tool, called safebook - viz:

http://www.safebook.us/home.html

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