- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

A Feldman preFPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 30 Aug '11

30 Aug '11

Ari Feldman will present his preFPO on Friday September 2 at 2PM in Room 302 (note room). The members of his committee are: Ed Felten, advisor; Mike Freedman and Andrew Appel, readers; David Walker and Brian Kernighan, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. -------------------------------------------------- Title: Using Untrusted Resources Securely Abstract: In a myriad of applications, users depend on devices or services provided by third parties to perform functions that they cannot carry out themselves or that third parties can do better. For example, in public elections, voters cast their votes on voting machines or paper ballots provided by election officials because they do not have the means to prepare properly formatted ballots on their own. In addition, in applications from word processing to social networking, users are increasingly adopting services in which their data resides not on their own devices, but on servers run by third parties. Users are drawn to these services because they provide levels of availability, scalability, and accessibility that average users cannot match using only their own equipment. Unfortunately, depending on third parties has typically forced users to give up control over their data. They must rely on the third parties to preserve their data’s confidentiality and integrity, and a third party that is malicious or has been subject to attack or legal pressure can compromise them. Furthermore, users typically have little more than the third parties’ promises to assure them that their data is safe. In this dissertation, we aim to improve this situation. We present protocols and systems that allow users to utilize third-party resources while providing them with a means to verify that the third parties are performing their functions correctly so that they need not trust mere promises. Our work covers three areas: cryptographic voting, cloud-based group collaboration, and social networking. Our prior work shows that widely-deployed non-cryptographic voting systems can be infected with malicious software that changes votes, potentially without detection. Vulnerabilities of this kind inspired the development of cryptographic voting systems in which the encryption of every cast ballot is made public and the encrypted ballots can be tallied in a publicly-verifiable way. Although cryptographic voting has the potential to make elections more trustworthy, it still forces voters to depend on voting machines to encrypt their ballots. Indeed, we show that a malicious voting machine can compromise the secrecy of the ballot by manipulating the ciphertext of only a handful of the ballots that are made public. We then present a protocol that significantly reduces this threat by forcing voting machines to encrypt ballots using random values chosen in advance of the election and that provides a way for anyone to verify that the right random values were used for every ballot. For applications such as word processing and calendaring, users are increasingly adopting cloud deployment because it provides benefits such as scalability, high availability, global accessibility, and real-time group collaboration. Unfortunately, moving to the cloud currently comes at the cost of trusting the cloud provider with users’ data. To overcome this tradeoff, we present SPORC, a generic framework for building a wide variety of collaborative applications with untrusted servers. In SPORC, servers only observe encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without being detected. SPORC allows concurrent, low-latency editing of shared state, permits disconnected operation, and supports dynamic access control even in the presence of concurrency. Current social networking applications also require users’ to trust service providers with the plaintext of their social interactions. In response, numerous works have proposed distributing users’ data across multiple servers controlled by different parties. But, unless users bear the burden of running their own servers, they are still forced to trust third parties. Instead, we present a social networking system that allows users’ data to be hosted entirely on untrusted servers while still protecting the data’s confidentiality and integrity. Our design includes novel data structures that support efficient membership operations even for large groups and provide strong protection against server equivocation for the append-only logs that social networking applications use extensively.

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S Jafarpour FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 25 Aug '11

25 Aug '11

Sina Jafarpour will present his FPO on Friday September 2 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Rob Calderbank (ELE/MAT), advisor; Rob Schapire and Ingrid Daubechies (MAT), readers; Bernard Chazelle and Amit Singer (MAT), nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Deterministic Compressed Sensing", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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I Mukherjee FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 23 Aug '11

23 Aug '11

Indraneel Mukherjee will present his FPO on Monday August 29 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Rob Schapire, advisor; David Blei and Yoav Freund (UCSD), readers; Moses Charikar and Philippe Rigollet (ORF), nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Game Theory and Optimization in Boosting", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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Y Zhu FPO
by Melissa Lawson 18 Aug '11

18 Aug '11

Yaping Zhu will present her FPO on Thursday August 25 at 1PM in Room 402. The members of her committee are: Jennifer Rexford, advisor; Vivek Pai and Aman Shaikh (AT&T), readers; Michael Freedman and Andrea LaPaugh, nonreaders. A copy of her thesis, "Minimizing Wide-Area Performance Disruptions in Inter-Domain Routing", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk.

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S Ihm FPO
by Melissa Lawson 18 Aug '11

18 Aug '11

Sunghwan Ihm will present his FPO on Wednesday August 24 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Vivek Pai, advisor; Jennifer Rexford and Larry Peterson, readers; Michael Freedman and Andrea LaPaugh, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Understanding and Improving Modern Web-Traffic Caching", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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J Jiang preFPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 02 Aug '11

02 Aug '11

Joe Wenjie Jiang will present his preFPO on Friday August 5 at 10:30AM in Room 318B (networking lab). Note location. His committee is: Jennifer Rexford, advisor; Andrea LaPaugh and Augustin Chaintreau (Columbia), readers; Mike Freedman and Mung Chiang (ELE), nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. ---------------------- Title: Wide-Area Traffic Management for Cloud Services Abstract: Cloud services need an effective way to distribute contents across wide area networks. Providing large-scale, geographically-replicated online services presents new opportunities for coordination between server selection (to match subscribers with servers), traffic engineering (to select efficient paths for the traffic) and adaptive content caching (to place contents sources close to users). Traditional designs isolate these problems, which degrades performance, scalability, reliability and responsiveness. We leverage the theory of distributed optimization, collaborative game theory and randomized algorithms to provide solutions that jointly optimizes over different degrees of design freedom. This dissertation proposes a sets of solutions to wide-area and data center traffic management, which consists of the following three thrusts: (i) Cooperative content distribution and traffic engineering in an ISP network. We develop cooperation models with an increasing amount of information exchange between ISPs and content providers. We show that the lack of communication leads to sub-optimal performance, and even when extra information is used inappropriately. We propose a joint design solution to reduce such efficiency loss. (ii) Traffic management in Nano data centers, which represents the trend of decentralizing content delivery by placing contents close to the last mile of end user connectivity and utilizing their upload capability. We solve a joint content caching and request routing problem for minimizing cross-traffic and propose a distributed implementation. (iii) Cost-efficient data center traffic engineering with joint server placement and route selection, by exploiting multipath capability and virtual machine migrations. Our systems can be easily implemented with incremental modifications to today's architecture such as content-selection mechanisms, and infrastructure such as switches and end hosts. The effectiveness of our schemes is demonstrated by our evaluation with real-life traffic traces.

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M Yu FPO
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 29 Jul '11

29 Jul '11

Minlan Yu will present her FPO on Friday August 5 at 3PM in Room 402. The members of her committee are: Jennifer Rexford, advisor; Michael Freedman and Albert Greenberg (MSR), readers; Vivek Pai and Ed Felten, nonreaders. A copy of her thesis, "Scalable Management of Enterprise and Data Center Networks", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk.

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Z Khan FPO
by Melissa Lawson 26 Jul '11

26 Jul '11

Zia Khan will present his FPO on Tuesday August 2 at 2PM in Carl Icahn Labs Room 101 (note location!). The members of his committee are: Mona Singh, advisor; Leonid Kruglyak and Benjamin Garcia, readers; Hilary Coller and Saeed Tavazoie, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Efficient Algorithms for Liquid Chromatography Coupled Mass Spectrometry Based Protein Quantification", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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11am Mon Jul 11 talk by Robin Kravets (UIUC) on mobility and disconnected networks in CS 402
by Jennifer Rexford 11 Jul '11

11 Jul '11

Speaker: Professor Robin Kravets, UIUC Title: Connecting the Disconnected Date/time: 11am-12pm on Monday July 11 Location: room 402 in the Computer Science building Abstract: Mobility, in all of its forms, results in networks with varying degrees of connectivity. Providing communication services in such networks relies on solutions that treat these disconnections as an expected part of the system, instead of as an exception to be handled out of band. However, handling disconnectivity breaks most architectures for more stable and connected networks. Instead of a standard layered approach to communication services, communication in such intermittently connected networks depends on three key components: contacts, or knowing who we meet, context, knowing what is in our neighborhood, and content, knowing how to find and deliver data. In this talk, I will present some of our current research on support for communication in intermittently connected networks, vehicular networks and mobile social networks, as well as the target applications and deployment testbeds. Bio: Robin Kravets is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the head of the Mobius group at UIUC, which researches communication issues in all types of networks that are challenged by mobility, including wireless LANs, ad hoc networks, sensor network, delay and disruption tolerant networks, vehicular networks, mobile social networks and personal area networks. Her research focuses on solutions that enable effective power management, connectivity management, data transport, congestion management, location management, routing and security. For more information, visit http://mobius.cs.illinois.edu.

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MohammadHossein Bateni FPO
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 03 Jun '11

03 Jun '11

MohammadHossein Bateni will present his FPO on Thursday June 9 at 1PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Moses Charikar, advisor; Sanjeev Arora and MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (Maryland), readers; Bernard Chazelle and Rob Schapire, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "A Primal-Dual Clustering Technique with Applications in Network Design" is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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