New Primitives and Metrics for Distributed Systems

             Byung-Gon Chun  ICSI Berkeley

          Monday, March 3, 11 AM, 414 CEPSR

With the advent of data centers and "cloud computing", distributed
systems are becoming much larger and far more sophisticated, with
computation spread over thousands of hosts and complex execution
paths. In this talk I will discuss new approaches to securing and
understanding these complex systems.

I will first describe how we can build more robust systems using a new
trusted primitive called Attested Append-Only Memory (A2M). We trade
off assumptions on trusted components for improved Byzantine fault
bounds of safety and liveness. I will then present a way of
characterizing the complexity of general networked systems. I will
describe a metric based on distributed state dependencies, and apply
it to routing and classical distributed systems.

Bio:
Byung-Gon Chun is a postdoctoral researcher at the International
Computer Science Institute, funded by Intel Corporation.  He received
his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of
California at Berkeley.  His research interests span distributed
systems and networks with emphasis on fault tolerance, security,
complexity, and system troubleshooting.