1998 - 1999 CS Annual Report                                                                  Faculty
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Fred B. Schneider

Professor
fbs@cs.cornell.edu

PhD SUNY Stonybrook, 1978

My research focuses on techniques to support construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity, mission-critical  settings. Most recently, I have been attacking problems related to computer security. 

The early part of this year was devoted to completing Trust in Cyberspace, the final report of the National Research Council study on Information Systems Trustworthiness. I also spent considerable time briefing various government 

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committees on the research agenda proposed in the report. 

Work continued with Ulfar Erlingsson on inlined reference monitors for enforcing security policies by object code editing. We prototyped a successor to our SASI tool. This new tool involves two components: PSLang (Policy Specification Language) and PoET (Policy Enforcement Toolkit). PSLang specifications define sets of events and, for each event, an action that updates some
security state or aborts a program. Thus, PSLang specifications represent states and state transitions of a security automaton but do so in a form familiar to programmers. 

I have begun to investigate interactions between security and fault-tolerance (working with Lidong Zhou and Robbert van Renesse). As an experiment, we are designing a highly available and secure distributed certificate server. Active replication is not suitable in this setting, since having replicas increases the vulnerability of the service. Our solution is to employ proactive signature sharing and to split signatures on certificates across the servers comprising the service. Corrupting a subset of the replicas no longer compromises the entire service. Based on this technology, we plan to implement a certificate repository and make it available on the Internet. 

Honors  
  • Professor-at-Large, Univ. of Tromsoe, Tromsoe, Norway (1996-2001) 

University Activities  

  • University Academic Freedom Committee 

  • Duffield Hall Siting Committee, College of Engineering 

  • Duffield Hall Design Committee, College of Engineering 

  • Faculty Recruiting Committee, Computer Science Department 

  • Computing Facilities Committee, Computer ScienceDepartment 

Professional Activities  
  • Editor-in-chief: Distributed Computing 
  • Editor: Information Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, High
    Integrity Systems, Annals of Software Engineering, ACM Computing Surveys  
  • Co-managing Editor: Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag 
  • Chairman: Steering committee, Information Systems Trustworthiness, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 
  • Program committee: 12th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, First International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications, Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (17 SOSP) 
  • JavaSoft  Security Advisory Committee 
  • IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) 
Lectures  
  • Trust in cyberspace. Critical Infrastructure Protection. Research and Development
    Interagency Working Group, White House, Washington DC, July 1998.  
  • —. National Security Agency, Washington DC, Sept. 1998.  
  • —. Predinner speech, National Research Council, Washington DC, Sept. 1998. 
  • —. Press Briefing, National Research Council, Washington DC, Sept. 1998. 
  • —. DAPRA Colloquium Series, DARPA, Arlington, VA, Oct 1998. 
  • —. Workshop on Information Assurance and Trustworthy Networks, Cross Industry Working Team (XWIT), Washington DC, Nov 1998.  
  • —. Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board, National Institute of Standards
    and Technology, Washington DC, Nov 1998. 
  • —. National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, Washington DC, Nov 1998.
  • —. Java Security Advisory Council, Sun Microsystems, Cupertino, CA, Dec. 1998. 
  • —. CISE Distinguished Lecture Series, National Science Foundation, Washington DC, March 1999. 
  • —. 13th HPCC Conference, Newport, Rhode Island, March 1999.  
  • —. EU-USA Workshop, A joint initiative on dependability in the Information Society: Defining an Agenda for Collaboration, Venice, Italy, Apr. 1999.  
  • —. Network Associates, Glenwood, Maryland, June 1999.  
  • Critical infrastructures you can trust: Where telecommunications fits. 26th Annual Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, Virginia, Oct 1998.  
  • Information systems trustworthiness. Panel Chair, 21st National Information Systems Security Conference, Crystal City, Virginia, Oct 1998.  
  • National Research Council report on trustworthiness. Invited speaker. 1998 
  • Information Survivability Workshop (ISW98), Orlando, Florida, Oct 1998.  
  • Trust in cyberspace? A research roadmap. Invited speaker. Fifth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, San Francisco, California, Nov 1998.  
  • Enforceable security policies. Computer Science, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Dec. 1998.  
  • —. LESS Lecture Series, Computer Science, Univ. of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas,
    Feb. 1998.  
  • Mobile agents and systems principles: Status Report. U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado
    Springs, Colorado, Feb. 1999.  
  • A network security research agenda. Panel chair, Network and Distributed System Security
    Symposium (NDSS '99), San Diego, California, Feb. 1999.  
  • NRC study on "Trust in Cyberspace". Invited lecture.   
  • Electronic Payments Forum, San Francisco, California, March 1999. 
Publications  
  • Automated stream-based analysis of fault-tolerance. Formal Techniques in Real-time and Fault-Tolerant Systems (FTRTFT98)LNCS 1486, Springer Verlag, Berlin, (1998), 113-122 (with Scott Stoller).  
  • Towards trustworthy networked information systems. InsideRisks 101, CACM 41, 11 (Nov
    1998), 144.  
  • Improving networked information system trustworthiness: A research agenda. Proceedings 21st National Information Systems Security Conference (Oct 1998), 766.  
  • Trust in Cyberspace, (editor). National Academy Press, (Dec. 1998), 331 pages. 
  • Evolving telephone networks. Inside Risks 103, CACM 42, 1 (Jan. 1999), 160 (with S.
    Bellovin).  
  • Operating system support for mobile agents. Republished in Mobility: Processes, Computers, and Agents (D. Milojicic, F. Douglis, and R. Wheeler, eds.), Addison Wesley and the ACM Press, (Apr. 1999), 557-563.  
  • What Tacoma taught us. Mobility: Processes,Computers, and Agents (D.Milojicic, F. Douglis, and R. Wheeler, eds.), Addison Wesley and the ACM Press, (Apr. 1999), 564-566 
  • NAP: Practical fault-tolerance for itinerant computations. Proc. 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (June1999), 180-189 (with D.Johansen, K. Marzullo, K. Jacobsen, and D. Zagorodnov).
Patents  
  • Transparent fault tolerant computer system. United States Patent 5,802,265, Sept. 1,
    1998 (with T. Bressoud, J. Ahern, K. Birman, R. Cooper, B. Glade, and J. Service).