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What and Who

Accountability for Distributed Systems

Andreas Haeberlen
University of Pennsylvania
SWS Colloquium

Andreas Haeberlen is a Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor at the
University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are in distributed
systems, networking, and security. Andreas received his PhD degree in
Computer Science from Rice University in 2009; he is the recipient of a
NSF CAREER award, and he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max
Planck Society.
AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, MMCI  
Expert Audience
English

Date, Time and Location

Thursday, 31 March 2016
10:30
60 Minutes
G26
111
Kaiserslautern

Abstract

Many of our everyday activities are now performed online - whether it is
banking, shopping, or chatting with friends. Behind the scenes, these
activities are implemented by large distributed systems that often
contain machines from several different organizations. Usually, these
machines do what we expect them to, but occasionally they 'misbehave' -
sometimes by mistake, sometimes to gain an advantage, and sometimes
because of a deliberate attack.

In society, accountability is widely used to counter such threats.
Accountability incentivizes good performance, exposes problems, and
builds trust between competing individuals and organizations. In this
talk, I will argue that accountability is also a powerful tool for
designing distributed systems. An accountable distributed system ensures
that 'misbehavior' can be detected, and that it can be linked to a
specific machine via some form of digital evidence. The evidence can
then be used just like in the 'offline' world, e.g., to correct the
problem and/or to take action against the responsible organizations.

I will give an overview of our progress towards accountable distributed
systems, ranging from theoretical foundations and efficient algorithms
to practical applications. I will also present one result in detail: a
technique that can detect information leaks through covert timing channels.

Contact

Brigitta Hansen
0681 93039102
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Video Broadcast

Yes
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Brigitta Hansen, 03/22/2016 10:02 -- Created document.