Mining your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices

September 16, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Mining your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices - Heninger et al. 2012 This paper definitely wins the 'best pun in a paper title' prize. P and Q here refer to the factors that are multiplied together when generating your public and private key pairs. As for the mining? It ... Continue Reading

MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday

September 15, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday - Kaminsky 2004 A few people have asked if I can cover more security topics in The Morning Paper. It's a subject area that always seems a little daunting to me (as in, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"), but it's also a subject area that I feel ... Continue Reading

Fast Database Restarts at Facebook

September 14, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Fast Database Restarts at Facebook - Goel et al. 2014 In security, you're only as secure as your weakest link in the chain. When it comes to agility, you're only as fast as your slowest link in the chain. Updating and evolving a stateless middle tier is usually pretty quick, but what if you need ... Continue Reading

Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network

September 11, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network - Singh et. al (Google) 2015 Let's end the week with something completely different: a look at ten years and five generations of networking within Google's datacenters. Bandwidth demands within the datacenter are doubling every 12-15 months, even faster than the ... Continue Reading

Out of the Fire Swamp – Part III, Go with the flow.

September 10, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Go with the flow At the conclusion of Part II we introduced the notion of a (micro)service owning exclusive access to a set of data in order to manage application invariants. Once we start to break things down this way, we need to start thinking about the flow of data between microservices. A better paradigm? ... Continue Reading

Out of the Fire Swamp – Part II, Peering into the mist

September 9, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Peering into the mist In Part I we examined the data crisis, accepted that anomalies are inevitable, and realized the central importance of the application. But what should we do about it? Here I'm peering into the mist and speculating about a way forward, navigating via the signposts that the database research community has put ... Continue Reading

Out of the Fire Swamp* – Part I, ‘The Data Crisis’

September 8, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments

(*) with apologies to Moseley, Marks, and Westley. Something a little different to the regular paper reviews for the next three days. Inspired by yesterday's 'Consistency without Borders,' and somewhat dismayed by what we learned in 'Feral Concurrency Control', I'm going to attempt to pull together a bigger picture, to the extent that I can ... Continue Reading

Consistency Without Borders

September 7, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Consistency Without Borders - Alvaro et al. 2013 We closed out last week by looking at the gap that has opened up between application developer needs and what the database community is providing, leading to the widespread adoption of Feral Concurrency Control. Today's paper, written two years earlier, anticipates this problem and discusses the possible ... Continue Reading

Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity

September 4, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

Feral Concurrency Control: An Empirical Investigation of Modern Application Integrity - Bailis et al. 2015 This paper is an absolute joy to read: seasoned database systems researchers conduct a study of real-world applications from the Ruby community and try not to show too much disdain at what they find, whilst pondering what it might all ... Continue Reading

Quantifying Isolation Anomalies

September 3, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Quantifying Isolation Anomalies - Fekete et al. 2009 Before we get into today's content, for those of you that can be in London for the week of the 14th September the GOTO London conference will be taking place with curated themes from Adrian Cockcroft discussing how we can build systems that are agile, lean, and ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Made delightfully fast by strattic

Month: September 2015