proof of deletion
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....
Photonics UK and Cyber Defense UK
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?? :)
A Data Center in every Car
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...
Safety in “numbers”?
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