Ivona Brandic, Energy Efficient Clouds
May 31, 10am SBA

Cloud computing is a promising technology for the realization of large, scalable, and on-demand provisioned computing infrastructures. Currently, many enterprises are adopting this technology to achieve high performance and scalability for their applications while maintaining low cost. Service provisioning in the Cloud is based on a set of predefined non-functional properties specified and negotiated by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Cloud workloads are dynamic and change constantly. Thus, in order to reduce steady human interactions, self-manageable Cloud techniques are required to comply with the agreed customers’ SLAs. In this talk we discuss flexible and reliable management of SLAs, which is of paramount importance for both Cloud providers and consumers. On the one hand, the prevention of SLA violations avoids penalties that are costly to providers. On the other hand, based on flexible and timely reactions to possible SLA violation threats, user interaction with the system can be minimized enabling Cloud computing to take roots as a flexible and reliable form of on-demand computing. Furthermore, a trade-off has to be found between proactive actions that prevent SLA violations and those that reduce energy consumption, i.e., increase energy efficiency.

Im Rahmen von IMPACT 2011 fanden vier interessante Vorträge statt.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Katzenbeisser – TU Darmstadt – Privacy by Design – Technischer Datenschutz für hochsensible Daten
Prof. Davide Balzarotti, Ph.D. – EURECOM Sophia Antipolis – G-Free: Defeating Return-Oriented Programming through Gadget-less Binaries
Prof. Dr. Günther Pernul – Universität Regensburg – On the Maturity of RBAC – A Survey and Classification of the Research Area
Günther Wiesauer – CEO Underground_8, Linz – Sicherheitsarchitektur für moderne Firewallsysteme

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Markus Huber will hold a seminar on Social Network Security at the DSV Form in Stockholm on the 19th of May.

May 10, 2011, 10am @ SBA: Designing Truthful Mechanisms
Angelina Vidali

In this talk I will present my work on many different aspects of one of the most fundamental problems in algorithmic game theory (and more specifically algorithmic mechanism design), the problem of scheduling unrelated machines to minimize the makespan and I will also explain its connection with the problem of designing truthful combinatorial auctions. We assume that the machines behave like selfish players: they have to get paid in order to process the tasks, and would lie about their processing times if they could increase their utility in this way. The problem was proposed and studied in the seminal paper of Nisan and Ronen, where it was shown that the approximation ratio of mechanisms is between 2 and n.

While performing traffic analysis on the current development version of Orbot, the official Android for Tor app, Manuel Leithner (Junior Researcher, SBA Research gGmbH) discovered that certain types of traffic (including VPN, GPS and videos) were not tunnelled through Tor. He subsequently developed a patch that enables full and enforced transparent proxying for all TCP and DNS traffic through the anonymisation service.