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Towards network-level efficiency for cloud storage services
- In 14th ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC
, 2014
"... Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mi-crosoft OneDrive provide users with a convenient and reliable way to store and share data from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. The cornerstone of these services is the data synchronization (sync) operation which automatically map ..."
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Cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Mi-crosoft OneDrive provide users with a convenient and reliable way to store and share data from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. The cornerstone of these services is the data synchronization (sync) operation which automatically maps the changes in users’ local filesystems to the cloud via a series of network communica-tions in a timely manner. If not designed properly, however, the tremendous amount of data sync traffic can potentially cause (fi-nancial) pains to both service providers and users. This paper addresses a simple yet critical question: Is the cur-rent data sync traffic of cloud storage services efficiently used? We first define a novel metric named TUE to quantify the Traffic UsageEfficiency of data synchronization. Based on both real-world traces and comprehensive experiments, we study and characterize the TUE of six widely used cloud storage services. Our results demonstrate that a considerable portion of the data sync traffic is in a sense wasteful, and can be effectively avoided or significant-ly reduced via carefully designed data sync mechanisms. All in all, our study of TUE of cloud storage services not only provides guidance for service providers to develop more efficient, traffic-economic services, but also helps users pick appropriate services that best fit their needs and budgets.
A TorPath to TorCoin: Proof-of-Bandwidth Altcoins for Compensating Relays
"... Abstract. The Tor network relies on volunteer relay operators for re-lay bandwidth, which may limit its growth and scaling potential. We propose an incentive scheme for Tor relying on two novel concepts. We introduce TorCoin, an “altcoin ” that uses the Bitcoin protocol to re-ward relays for contrib ..."
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Abstract. The Tor network relies on volunteer relay operators for re-lay bandwidth, which may limit its growth and scaling potential. We propose an incentive scheme for Tor relying on two novel concepts. We introduce TorCoin, an “altcoin ” that uses the Bitcoin protocol to re-ward relays for contributing bandwidth. Relays “mine ” TorCoins, then sell them for cash on any existing altcoin exchange. To verify that a given TorCoin represents actual bandwidth transferred, we introduce TorPath, a decentralized protocol for forming Tor circuits such that each circuit is privately-addressable but publicly verifiable. Each circuit’s participants may then collectively mine a limited number of TorCoins, in proportion to the end-to-end transmission goodput they measure on that circuit. 1
Structural cloud audits that protect private information
- In ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW
, 2013
"... As organizations and individuals have begun to rely more and more heavily on cloud-service providers for critical tasks, cloud-service reliability has become a top priority. It is natural for cloud-service providers to use redundancy to achieve reliability. For example, a provider may replicate crit ..."
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As organizations and individuals have begun to rely more and more heavily on cloud-service providers for critical tasks, cloud-service reliability has become a top priority. It is natural for cloud-service providers to use redundancy to achieve reliability. For example, a provider may replicate critical state in two data centers. If the two data centers use the same power supply, however, then a power out-age will cause them to fail simultaneously; replication per se does not, therefore, enable the cloud-service provider to make strong reliability guarantees to its users. Zhai et al. [28] present a sys-tem, which they refer to as a structural-reliability auditor (SRA), that uncovers common dependencies in seemingly disjoint cloud-infrastructural components (such as the power supply in the exam-ple above) and quantifies the risks that they pose. In this paper, we focus on the need for structural-reliability auditing to be done in a privacy-preserving manner. We present a privacy-preserving structural-reliability auditor (P-SRA), discuss its privacy proper-ties, and evaluate a prototype implementation built on the Share-mind SecreC platform [6]. P-SRA is an interesting application of secure multi-party computation (SMPC), which has not often been used for graph problems. It can achieve acceptable running times even on large cloud structures by using a novel data-partitioning technique that may be useful in other applications of SMPC.
Heading Off Correlated Failures through Independence-as-a-Service
"... Today’s systems pervasively rely on redundancy to en-sure reliability. In complex multi-layered hardware/soft-ware stacks, however – especially in the clouds where many independent businesses deploy interacting services on common infrastructure – seemingly independent sys-tems may share deep, hidden ..."
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Today’s systems pervasively rely on redundancy to en-sure reliability. In complex multi-layered hardware/soft-ware stacks, however – especially in the clouds where many independent businesses deploy interacting services on common infrastructure – seemingly independent sys-tems may share deep, hidden dependencies, undermin-ing redundancy efforts and introducing unanticipated correlated failures. Complementing existing post-failure forensics, we propose Independence-as-a-Service (or INDaaS), an architecture to audit the independence of redundant systems proactively, thus avoiding correlated failures. INDaaS first utilizes pluggable dependency ac-quisition modules to collect the structural dependency information (including network, hardware, and software dependencies) from a variety of sources. With this infor-mation, INDaaS then quantifies the independence of sys-tems of interest using pluggable auditing modules, of-fering various performance, precision, and data secrecy tradeoffs. While the most general and efficient auditing modules assume the auditor is able to obtain all required information, INDaaS can employ private set intersection cardinality protocols to quantify the independence even across businesses unwilling to share their full structural information with anyone. We evaluate the practicality of INDaaS with three case studies via auditing realistic net-work, hardware, and software dependency structures. 1
