Sensitive data such as health records and financial transactions are increasingly being stored and processed in the cloud. Correspondingly, laws and regulations have been established to protect such data. For a cloud-based analytics service provider, it is of paramount importance to protect the sensitive information contained in customer data, while running analytics on it. While there exist a plethora of technologies to safeguard data, regulatory rules are not always defined in clear technical terms, and different regulations may impose different (or sometimes conflicting) rules on the analytics platform. Therefore, it remains a challenge in developing a platform that can support various security and compliance-enabling mechanisms, in a agile fashion, to reduce maintenance effort as well as improving scalability and performance. To address this challenge, we introduce the design and implementation of a cloud-based middleware platform that supports on-demand composition and configuration of security mechanisms to ease regulatory compliance enablement. We discuss at length our experiences and lessons learned from using our platform to deploy secure analytics systems at IBM and highlight the benefits of our approach by discussing the performance impact and trade-offs of different security mechanisms with respect to regulatory compliance.

System administrators have unlimited access to system resources. As the Snowden case highlighted, these permissions can be exploited to steal valuable personal, classified, or commercial data. This problem is exacerbated when a third party administers the system. For example, a bank outsourcing its IT would not want to allow administrators access to the actual data. We propose WatchIT: a strategy that constrains IT personnel's view of the system and monitors their actions. To this end, we introduce the abstraction of perforated containers -- while regular Linux containers are too restrictive to be used by system administrators, by "punching holes" in them, we strike a balance between information security and required administrative needs. Following the principle of least privilege, our system predicts which system resources should be accessible for handling each IT issue, creates a perforated container with the corresponding isolation, and deploys it as needed for fixing the problem.

One of the adverse effects of shrinking transistor sizes is that processors have become increasingly prone to hardware faults. At the same time, the number of cores per die rises. Consequently, core failures can no longer be ruled out, and future operating systems for many-core machines will have to incorporate fault tolerance mechanisms.

Storage class memory (SCM) is an emerging class of memory devices that are both byte addressable, and persistent. There are many different technologies that can be considered SCM, at different stages of maturity. Examples of such technologies include NVDIMM-N, PCM, SttRAM, Racetrack, FeRAM, and others.

The constant race for faster and more powerful CPUs is drawing to a close. No longer is it feasible to significantly increase the speed of the CPU without paying a crushing penalty in power consumption and production costs. Instead of increasing single thread performance, the industry is turning to multiple CPU threads or cores (such as SMT and CMP) and heterogeneous CPU architectures (such as the Cell Broadband Engine). While this is a step in the right direction, in every modern PC there is a wealth of untapped compute resources. The NIC has a CPU; the disk controller is programmable; some high-end graphics adaptersare already more powerful than host CPUs. Some of these CPUs can perform some functions more efficiently than the host CPUs. Our operating systems and programming abstractions should be expanded to let applications tap into these computational resources and make the best use of them.

Self-healing capabilities allow software systems to overcome problems occurring during testing and run time, and thus improve overall system behavior. The PANACEA framework introduced in this paper provides a design methodology as well as ready-to-use healing elements aimed at enhancing software systems with self-healing capabilities both at design time and at run time. The PANACEA approach is based on inserting self- healing elements into the system at design and coding time, to be used later for healing at testing and run time. Specifically, the Panacea framework is based on inserting annotations into the system code at design and coding time, to later on serve as an interface for runtime monitoring, managing, configuring and healing of the annotated system components. The current embodiment of PANACEA includes several generic components that provide self-healing capabilities suited for a variety of application types. The PANACEA runtime environment automatically activates and invokes these components in order to optimize and heal the application. The PANACEA framework provides an innovative programming model that enables development of advanced self-healing applications. PANACEA introduces a paradigm shift in which software is made self-healing by design. This paradigm shift, however, is graceful since developers are not required to master neither new programming skills, nor languages. As our initial experiments demonstrate, PANACEA introduces a very small performance overhead, and scales well.

During the last two decades, a considerable amount of academic research has been conducted in the field of distributed computing. Typically, distributed applications require frequent network communication, which becomes a dominate factor in the overall runtime overhead. The recent proliferation of programmable peripheral devices for computer systems may be utilized in order to improve the performance of such applications. Offloading application-specific network functions to peripheral devices can improve performance and reduce host CPU utilization. Due to the peculiarities of each particular device and the difficulty of programming an outboard CPU, the need for an abstracted offloading framework is apparent. This paper proposes a novel offloading framework, called HYDRA that enables utilization of such devices. The framework enables an application developer to design the offloading aspects of the application by specifying an "offloading layout", which is enforced by the runtime during application deployment. The performance of a variety of distributed algorithms can be significantly improved by utilizing such a framework. We demonstrate this claim by evaluating several offloaded applications: a distributed total message ordering algorithm and a packet generator.

We have implemented a firewall application on a Network Interface Card (NIC). We have tested the CPU utilization and the bandwidth in a variety of scenarios. The benefits of offloading code are most pronounced when rejecting packets. Our results suggest significant benefits of offloading applications and in particular firewall logic to a NIC. I. INTRODUCTION There are many communication applications that act on every incoming packet. Offloading such applications to the network interface card (NIC) has many potential advantages. Utilizing the onboard computational power of the NIC can reduce the demands put on the CPU. If the NIC can process incoming information it can avoid costly interrupts to the CPU. In addition, the NIC can serve as a gatekeeper thus avoiding potential threats to the CPU. Furthermore, applications on a NIC can be built such that they are system and OS indepen- dent. An application of particular promise for offloading is a firewall application. Since a firewall is an application that filters packets by a user defined security policy, earlier filtering (especially discarding packets) has a potential for significant improvements in performance. A firewall application on a NIC also has the additional advantage that it is harder for an adversary to modify than a software application running at the host. We have designed and implemented a firewall application which we call SCIRON (Secure-Communication IntegRated Over NIC) on a NIC. The system consists of three elements: The firewall logic, a management console and a policy builder. This paper presents SCIRON, and shows that offloading full applications has significant advantages and market potential more so than TCP offload engines (9) (TOEs) or protocol specific offloaded extensions.

The proliferation of programmable peripheral devices for computer systems opens new possibilities for academic research that will influence system designs in the near future. Programmability is a key feature that enables application-specific extensions to improve performance and offer new features. Increasing transistor density and decreasing cost provide excess computational power in devices such as disk controllers, network interfaces and video cards. This paper proposes an innovative programming model and runtime support that enables utilization of such devices by providing a generic code offloading framework. The framework enables an application developer to design the offloading aspects of the application by specifying an "offloading layout", which is enforced by the runtime during application deployment. The framework also provides the necessary development tools and programming constructs for developing such applications. We test our framework by implementing a packet generator on a programmable network card for network testing. The offloaded application produces traffic at five times the rate, and with inter-packet variability that is many orders of magnitude smaller than the non-offloaded version

The emergence of networked lightweight portable computing devices can potentially enable accessibility to a vast array of remote applications and data. In order to cope with shortage of local resources such as memory, CPU and bandwidth, such applications are typically designed as a thin-client thick-server applications. However, another highly desirable yet conflicting requirement is to support disconnected operation, due to the low quality and high cost of on-line connectivity. We present a novel programming model and a runtime infrastructure that addresses these requirements by automatically reconfiguring the application to operate in disconnected mode of operation, when voluntary disconnection is requested, and automatically resorting to normal distributed operation, upon reconnection. The programming model enables developers to design disconnected aware applications by providing a set of component reference annotations with special disconnection and reconnection semantics. Using these annotations, designers can identify critical components, priorities, dependencies, local component alternatives with reduced functionality, and state merging policies. The runtime infrastructures carries out dis- and re-connection semantics using component mobility and dynamic application layout. The disconnected operation framework, FarGo-DA, is an extension of FarGo, a mobile component framework for distributed applications.