Cornell Systems Lunch

Mobile and wireless-enabled devices are becoming more and more common, but applications running on them operate under constraints which can be very different from those on desktop hosts. For example, unpredictable network connectivity can lead to wide variations in available bandwidth, which a mobile host must adapt to if it is to provide efficient, highly-consistent access to shared data. Overcoming these constraints is a vital prerequisite for supporting an emerging application environment of mobile, collaborative data access in the workplace. This talk will describe MFS, an adaptive distributed file system developed at Cornell, how MFS supports this type of collaborative data access, and results from experimental evaluation of the system.

Secure Infrastructure for Networked Systems (SINS) is an agent-based secure middleware project being executed at the Naval Research Laboratory to address some of these challenges. The SINS architecture comprises a distributed collection of agent interpreters, each capable of running agents written in the synchronous language SOL (Secure Operations Language), which has a well defined formal semantics and an associated automatic theorem proving system (Salsa). The author of each SOL agent provides an inductive invariant, using which the recipient can establish (with Salsa) its compliance with certain local policies. Other policies are enforced by locally deployed "security agents". The SINS middleware provides the necessary framework for agent deployment, communication, fault-tolerance, and migration. We are currently applying SINS to problems of Information Assurance for the US Navy's Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE). In this talk I shall outline some of the concerns of OACE being addressed by SINS, and conclude with a set of interesting research issues.