Fabric

Fabric is a federated, distributed system for securely and reliably storing, sharing, and computing information. It is under construction by the Applied Programming Languages Group at Cornell University.

Fabric presents a single-system image of all resources that can be named by it, and provides security guarantees to mutually distrusting principals using it, but it is a decentralized system with no centralized security enforcement mechanism. Fabric provides decentralized yet compositional security.

The Fabric programming language, based on Jif, controls the placement of computation and data through type annotations that set policies for information security. Strong consistency is ensured through a hierarchical two-phase commit protocol that respects information security. Fabric leverages peer-to-peer replication to provide high availability.

The development of Fabric has been supported by NSF awards 0627649 and CCF-0964409, by ONR award N00014-09-1-0652, and by Air Force Research Laboratory award FA8750-08-2-0079.

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Publications

• Sharing mobile code securely with information flow control
  Proc. 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'12), pp. 192–205, May 2012. Owen Arden, Michael D. George, Jed Liu, K. Vikram, Aslan Askarov, Andrew C. Myers.

• Fabric: A platform for secure distributed computation and storage
  Proc. 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'09), pp. 321–334, October 2009. Jed Liu, Michael D. George, K. Vikram, Xin Qi, Lucas Waye, and Andrew C. Myers.

Project members

• Andrew Myers (faculty)
• Fred Schneider (faculty)
• Nate Foster (faculty)
• Jed Liu
• Mike George
• K. Vikram
• Xin Qi
• Lucas Waye
• Owen Arden
• Danfeng Zhang