MASCOTS2010

The Cloud, the Edge and Beneath

Sumi Helal
Professor and Director of Pervasive and Mobile Computing Laboratory,
Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~helal

Abstract: In principle, the entire world can earnestly exploit sensors and pervasive systems to great societal benefits. In practice, however, there are no widely known models or tools for evaluating, simulating or benchmarking their performance. Unlike traditional distributed systems, where the resource/needs of computation and communication dominate the performance equation, pervasive systems forge new metrics and requirements. First, sensing should be accounted for, in addition to computing and communication. This includes sensing latency and sensing energy consumption. Second, sentience efficiency should be established as a critical metric of performance; oversampling a sensor or unnecessarily sensing another decreases both sentience efficiency and energy efficiency.

In this keynote, I will present a performance model of pervasive systems based on a symbiotic relationship between the massive-scale networks of sensors and the cloud. I will show why initial processing of sensor data must take place deep in-network, or the cloud could be bottlenecked. I will also show the role of edge computing and how it connects sensors to the cloud, enables pervasive decisioning and improves performance. I will present the Atlas sensor platform, an in-network sensing, communication and processing technology utilized to implement the cloud-edge-sensor collaboration model. I will then report on several performance evaluation studies based on Atlas, including in-network sensor query optimization, in-network phenomena detection and tracking and in-network event-condition-action rule evaluations. Finally, I will present Persim, a recent effort to create pervasive system simulation environments with focus on activity recognition and dataset generation and validation. I will end with a summary of grand challenges and opportunities in the area of pervasive systems performance modeling and evaluation.

Biography: Sumi Helal is Professor in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, and Director of its Pervasive and Mobile Computing Laboratory. His active areas of research focus on understanding and enabling cyber-physical computing systems and their human-centric applications. Specifically he and his research team investigate middleware, programming models and methodologies to define and support the entire lifecycle of pervasive spaces.

From 2001-2007, Dr. Helal served as Director of Technology Development of the University of Florida Rehabilitating Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Aging and Independence. He is co-founder and Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, a large ongoing project aiming at creating technological breakthroughs that will allow the Smart Home Concept to be successfully commercialized (creating the “Smart Home in a Box” concept). He is a co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is also the Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He currently serves as Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Computer magazine and serves on the editorial board of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He published extensively and is inventor/co-inventor of 6 issued patents and 10 pending patent applications. He has been a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since October 2000. Dr. Helal organized over 20 IEEE/ACM conferences as General or Program Chair. In 2009 he was General Chair of the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Dr. Helal earned his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University in 1991. Before joining the University of Florida, he held academic and industrial research positions at the University of Texas at Arlington, Purdue University and MCC, in Austin, Texas.

Quantitative Security Metrics

William H. Sanders

Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering,
Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept.,
Computer Science Dept.,
Information Trust Institute, and Coordinated Science Laboratory,
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, IL 61801, USA
http://www.crhc.illinois.edu/Faculty/whs.html

Abstract: Making sound security decisions when designing, operating, and maintaining a complex system is a challenging task. Analysts need to be able to understand and predict how different factors a ffect the overall system security. During system design, security analysts want to compare the security of multiple proposed system architectures. After a system is deployed, analysts want to determine where security enhancement should be focused by examining how the system is most likely to be successfully penetrated. And when several security enhancement options are being considered, analysts would like to evaluate the relative merits of each. In each of these scenarios, quantitative security metrics could provide insight on system security and aid security decisions. Quantitative metrics enable ranking the alternatives to determine the best option. Quantitative assessments of system security are also valuable for risk management trade-o ff decisions.

To provide insight on system security and aid decision-makers, we propose the ADversary VIew Security Evaluation (ADVISE) method to quantitatively evaluate the strength of a system's security. Our approach is to create an executable state-based security model of a system. The security model is initialized with information characterizing the system and the adversaries attacking the system. The model then simulates the attack behavior of the adversaries to produce a quantitative assessment of system security strength. This talk describes the system and adversary characterization data that are collected as input for the executable model. It also describes the simulation algorithms for adversary attack behavior and the computation for the probability that an attack attempt is successful. A simple case study illustrates how to analyze system security using the ADVISE method. A tool is currently under development to facilitate automatic model generation and simulation. The ADVISE method aggregates security-relevant information about a system and its adversaries to produce a quantitative security analysis useful for holistic system security decisions.

Biography: William H. Sanders is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, the Director of the Information Trust Institute, and the Acting Director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. He is a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and past Vice-Chair of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of Performance Evaluation.

Dr. Sanders's research interests include performance/dependability/security evaluation, dependable and secure computing, and reliable distributed systems. He has published more than 200 technical papers in these areas. He is currently the Director and PI of two centers at Illinois, the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center, and the DOE/DHS TCIPG Center, aimed at making the power grid resilient to attacks and failures. He is a co-developer of three tools for assessing computer-based systems: METASAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. Möbius and UltraSAN have been distributed widely to industry and academia; more than 500 licenses for the tools have been issued to universities, companies, and NASA for evaluating the performance, dependability, and security of a variety of systems.