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SMesh

Steward

Prime

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Current Research

Resilient Systems Messaging Systems Remote Manipulation

Yair Amir's Don P. Giddens lecture, the Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 16 Februray 2012:

Lecture on YouTube: From Overlays to Clouds: Inventing a New Network Paradigm.
Power point slides to go together with the lecture.
Slides in PDF format.

Resilient Systems

We are interested in designing and implementing systems resilient to both internal and external attacks. Our work in this area combines Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols with cryptographic mechanisms to create scalable, efficient, and robust software solutions.

As more critical infrastructure moves toward the Internet-based cloud computing paradigm, previously isolated systems are now vulnerable to attack. We seek to provide a variety of tools that the managers of these systems can deploy to enable their systems to continue working with good performance even while under attack.

Our previous work in this domain has dealt solely with byzantine fault-tolerant replication. Please click here for general details of our work in this area.
  • Steward
    Steward is the first hierarchical intrusion-tolerant replication architecture suitable to systems that span multiple wide-area sites, each consisting of several server replicas.
  • Prime
    Prime is the first Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol to make a meaningful performance guarantee even when some of the servers are compromised.

Messaging Systems

We focus on messaging systems for wide area and wireless environments, more specifically on routing, multicast and reliability protocols for networks that rapidly change in structure, availability and bandwidth.
  • Spines
    Spines is a software research platform that allows experimentation and deployment of overlay networks in the Internet. Spines instantiates overlay nodes on the participating computers, and creates virtual links between these nodes. It allows both reliable and best-effort communication through an API very similar to the socket interface.
  • SMesh
    SMesh is a seamless wireless mesh network that provides peer-to-peer connectivity, Internet connectivity, and fast handoff to mobile clients across the mesh. SMesh underlying communication infrastructure is built on a customized version of Spines.
  • Spread Wide Area Multicast and Group Communication Toolkit
    Spread is a group communication toolkit developed by DSN. It supports both local area networks and wide area networks, while providing services ranging from reliable message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees even in the case of failures. This kind of service is crucial for building useful infrastructures such as scalable certification systems and high performance access control services , as well as collaborative applications and replicated databases. It is available for download.
  • Secure Spread
    The Secure Spread project integrates security services with reliable group communication. In particular, it enhances the Spread Toolkit with security services.

Remote Manipulation

We are interested in designing and implementing systems that enable the timely, reliable, and available communication that remote manipulation tasks require. This pushes the limit of low-latency communication because in order for a human operator to feel physically present, the total round-trip time of the feedback loop cannot exceed 130 ms.



Questions or comments to:
webmaster@dsn.jhu.edu
TEL: (410) 516-5562
FAX: (410) 516-6134
Distributed Systems and Networks Lab
Computer Science Department
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218-2686