Publications from 2011

Managing many computers is difficult. Recent virtualization trends exacerbate this problem by making it easy to create and deploy multiple virtual appliances per physical machine, each of which can be configured with different applications and utilities. This results in a huge scaling problem for large organizations as management overhead grows linearly with the number of appliances.

To address this problem, we introduce Strata, a system that combines unioning file system and package management semantics to enable more efficient creation, provisioning and management of virtual appliances. Unlike traditional systems that depend on monolithic file systems, Strata uses a collection of individual sotware layers that are composed together into the Virtual Layered File System (VLFS) to provide the traditional file system view. Individual layers are maintained in a central repository and shared across all file systems that use them. Layer changes and upgrades only need to be done once in the repository and are then automatically propagated to all virtual appliances, resulting in management overhead independent of the number of appliances. Our Strata Linux prototype requires only a single loadable kernel module providing the VLFS support and doesn't require any application or source code level kernel modifications. Using this prototype, we demonstrate how Strata enables fast system provisioning, simplifies system maintenance and upgrades, speeds system recovery from security exploits, and incurs only modest performance overhead.

Process races occur when multiple processes access shared operating system resources, such as files, without proper synchronization. We present the first study of real process races and the first system designed to detect them. Our study of hundreds of applications shows that process races are numerous, difficult to debug, and a real threat to reliability. To address this problem, we created RacePro, a system for automatically detecting these races. RacePro checks deployed systems in-vivo by recording live executions then deterministically replaying and checking them later. This approach increases checking coverage beyond the configurations or executions covered by software vendors or beta testing sites. RacePro records multiple processes, detects races in the recording among system calls that may concurrently access shared kernel objects, then tries different execution orderings of such system calls to determine which races are harmful and result in failures. To simplify race detection, RacePro models under-specified system calls based on load and store micro-operations. To reduce false positives and negatives, RacePro uses a replay and go-live mechanism to distill harmful races from benign ones. We have implemented RacePro in Linux, shown that it imposes only modest recording overhead, and used it to detect a number of previously unknown bugs in real applications caused by process races.

Implementation-level software model checking explores the state space of a system implementation directly to find potential software defects without requiring any specification or modeling. Despite early successes, the effectiveness of this approach remains severely constrained due to poor scalability caused by state-space explosion. DeMeter makes software model checking more practical with the following contributions: (i) proposing dynamic interface reduction, a new state-space reduction technique, (ii) introducing a framework that enables dynamic interface reduction in an existing model checker with a reasonable amount of effort, and (iii) providing the framework with a distributed runtime engine that supports parallel distributed model checking.

We have integrated DeMeter into two existing model checkers, MaceMC and MoDist, each involving changes of around 1,000 lines of code. Compared to the original MaceMC and MoDist model checkers, our experiments have shown state-space reduction from a factor of five to up to five orders of magnitude in representative distributed applications such as Paxos, Berkeley DB, Chord, and Pastry. As a result, when applied to a deployed Paxos implementation, which has been running in production data centers for years to manage tens of thousands of machines, DeMeter manages to explore completely a logically meaningful state space that covers both phases of the Paxos protocol, offering higher assurance of software reliability that was not possible before.

Deterministic multithreading (DMT) eliminates many pernicious software problems caused by nondeterminism. It works by constraining a program to repeat the same thread interleavings, or schedules, when given same input. Despite much recent research, it remains an open challenge to build both deterministic and efficient DMT systems for general programs on commodity hardware. To deterministically resolve a data race, a DMT system must enforce a deterministic schedule of shared memory accesses, or mem-schedule, which can incur prohibitive overhead. By using schedules consisting only of synchronization operations, or sync-schedule, this overhead can be avoided. However, a sync-schedule is deterministic only for race-free programs, but most programs have races.

Our key insight is that races tend to occur only within minor portions of an execution, and a dominant majority of the execution is still race-free. Thus, we can resort to a mem-schedule only for the "racy" portions and enforce a sync-schedule otherwise, combining the efficiency of sync-schedules and the determinism of mem-schedules. We call these combined schedules hybrid schedules.

Based on this insight, we have built PEREGRINE, an efficient deterministic multithreading system. When a program first runs on an input, PEREGRINE records an execution trace. It then relaxes this trace into a hybrid schedule and reuses the schedule on future compatible inputs efficiently and deterministically. PEREGRINE further improves efficiency with two new techniques: determinism-preserving slicing to generalize a schedule to more inputs while preserving determinism, and schedule-guided simplification to precisely analyze a program according to a specific schedule. Our evaluation on a diverse set of programs shows that PEREGRINE is deterministic and efficient, and can frequently reuse schedules for half of the evaluated programs.

Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users carry multiple phones to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. We present Cells, a virtualization architecture for enabling multiple virtual smartphones to run simultaneously on the same physical cellphone in an isolated, secure manner. Cells introduces a usage model of having one foreground virtual phone and multiple background virtual phones. This model enables a new device namespace mechanism and novel device proxies that integrate with lightweight operating system virtualization to multiplex phone hardware across multiple virtual phones while providing native hardware device performance. Cells virtual phone features include fully accelerated 3D graphics, complete power management features, and full telephony functionality with separately assignable telephone numbers and caller ID support. We have implemented a prototype of Cells that supports multiple Android virtual phones on the same phone. Our performance results demonstrate that Cells imposes only modest runtime and memory overhead, works seamlessly across multiple hardware devices including Google Nexus 1 and Nexus S phones, and transparently runs Android applications at native speed without any modifications.

This paper seeks to advance the state of the art in practical selfdestructing data systems that secure sensitive data from disclosure in our highly mobile, social-networked, cloud-computing world. Our work facilitates the automatic, timed, and simultaneous destruction of all copies of a self-destructing data object (such as a message or file) without any explicit action by the user and without relying on any single trusted third party.

We make three contributions to the study of self-destructing data. First, we present Cascade, an extensible framework for integrating multiple key-storage mechanisms into a single self-destructing data system. Cascade enhances resistance to attack by combining the security advantages of a diverse set of key-storage approaches. Second, we introduce Tide, a new key-storage system for self-destructing data that leverages the ubiquity and easy deployment of Apache Web servers throughout the Internet. Third, based on our earlier work on Vanish and in light of recent attacks against the Vuze DHT, we demonstrate how to significantly harden Vuze and other DHTs against Sybil data-harvesting attacks, making DHTs applicable as key-storage systems under Cascade.

To validate our approach, we designed, implemented, deployed, and measured these systems. We prototyped the extensible Cascade system with support for Tide, Vuze, and OpenDHT. We prototyped the Tide key-storage system on Apache, deployed it on over 400 PlanetLab nodes in the Internet, and demonstrated that the structure is highly immune to attack. Finally, we designed and deployed a set of defenses to Sybil data-harvesting attacks in the live Vuze P2P system and measured them at full scale in the million-node DHT; our results demonstrate that these defenses provide a three-orderof- magnitude improvement over the original Vuze DHT, rendering data-harvesting attacks extremely impractical.

While emerging computing technologies - such as cloud computing and small, powerful, mobile devices - offer previously unimaginable global access to data and applications, they also threaten users' sense of control over data ownership, distribution, and properties. For example, uploading some data to a Web service - such as a document to Google Docs, a photo to Facebook, or an email to Hotmail - causes the user to lose control over that data. The user cannot ensure that the service deletes all copies of her data when she asks it to do so, that her data is not shared with advertisers, or that her data is replicated sufficiently to ensure its long-term availability. Similarly, storing data on a mobile device causes the user to lose control over that data when the device is stolen or lost; the user cannot ensure that the data can never be compromised and she cannot tell whether it has been compromised.

This dissertation examines the broad data security, privacy, and management challenges raised by modern technology and proposes a set of techniques that address these issues. We present four systems, each aiming to re-empower users with a specific aspect of their lost data control. Keypad offers remote access control and auditability for data stored on a stolen device. Vanish provides control over the lifetime of data stored in untrusted clouds. Comet lets clients customize the functionality of trusted cloud storage, while Menagerie provides a uniform view of a user's scattered Web data. We present the design, implementation, and detailed evaluation for each of the four systems, demonstrating the feasibility of our approaches.

Software failures due to configuration errors are commonplace as computer systems continue to grow larger and more complex. Troubleshooting these configuration errors is a major administration cost, especially in server clusters where problems often go undetected without user interference.

This paper presents CODE---tool that automatically detects software configuration errors. Our approach is based on identifying invariant configuration access rules that predict what access events follow what contexts. It requires no source code, application-specific semantics, or heavyweight program analysis. Using these rules, CODE can sift through a voluminous number of events and detect deviant program executions. This is in contrast to previous approaches that focus on only diagnosis. In our experiments, CODE successfully detected a real configuration error in one of our deployment machines, in addition to 20 user-reported errors that we reproduced in our test environment. When analyzing month-long event logs from both user desktops and production servers, CODE yielded a low false positive rate. The efficiency of CODE makes it feasible to be deployed as a practical management tool with low overhead.

Software bugs that occur in production are often difficult to reproduce in the lab due to subtle differences in the application environment and nondeterminism. To address this problem, we present Transplay, a system that captures production software bugs into small per-bug recordings which are used to reproduce the bugs on a completely different operating system without access to any of the original software used in the production environment. Transplay introduces partial checkpointing, a new mechanism that efficiently captures the partial state necessary to reexecute just the last few moments of the application before it encountered a failure. The recorded state, which typically consists of a few megabytes of data, is used to replay the application without requiring the specific application binaries, libraries, support data, or the original execution environment. Transplay integrates with existing debuggers to provide standard debugging facilities to allow the user to examine the contents of variables and other program state at each source line of the application’s replayed execution. We have implemented a Transplay prototype that can record unmodified Linux applications and replay them on different versions of Linux as well as Windows. Experiments with several applications including Apache and MySQL show that Transplay can reproduce real bugs and be used in production with modest recording overhead.

Performance of data-parallel computing (e.g., MapReduce, DryadLINQ) heavily depends on its data partitions. Solutions implemented by the current state of the art systems are far from optimal. Techniques proposed by the database community to find optimal data partitions are not directly applicable when complex user-defined functions and data models are involved. We outline our solution, which draws expertise from various fields such as programming languages and optimization, and present our preliminary results.