Dependable Network Data Plane for the Cloud

With the advent of new data-centric services related to entertainment, business, health, etc., the number of applications, the size of the user base, and the amount of applications deployed in the modern Cloud is growing explosively. While users of Cloud services benefit from high flexibility and low infrastructure cost, they inevitably accept the sharing of resources, facilities, and infrastructure with other users. The consequences of this, often undesired fate-sharing, are contradictory: on the one hand, it is a key to the apparent business success of the multi-tenant cloud, on the other hand it raises significant reliability and security concerns. What if a malevolent user steals, spoofs, or tampers with the data of another user with whom they share, e.g., the same server in the Cloud data center? What if, instead of directly attacking the other user, bad actors merely run an adverse workload on their resource slice that will interfere with the service provision of innocent Cloud users, e.g., increases the time to respond to web requests to a time frame that will be intolerably slow for an enjoyable customer experience? Unfortunately, this type of inadvertent or intended breaking of the data and performance isolation between users is clearly possible in the Cloud, as demonstrated by a set of recent high-profile incidents. What is worse, it is enough to have only a single malevolent user of a data center to cause massive collateral damage to an entire fleet of victims. The reason is that it is not just physical resources, like servers, CPUs, memory, storage, and network devices that are shared between users, but also a set of much less tangible assets as well, namely, algorithms and data-structures and the state embodied by these "virtual" artifacts. Unfortunately, in order to facilitate the unprecedented programmability and sharing provided by the Cloud, the algorithms and data-structures applied there are often fairly complex and not always designed with availability, reliability, security, and performability (i.e., dependability), in mind. The objective of this project is to chart a comprehensive algorithmic landscape of the "trustworthiness" (dependability) and the isolation properties of the typical algorithms and data structures applied in the Cloud, and to design new algorithms and data-structures with dependability as a critical feature rather than an afterthought.

No additional funding sources recorded.