Zeus: Analyzing safety of smart contracts Kalra et al., NDSS’18 I’m sure many readers of The Morning Paper are also relatively experienced programmers. So how does this challenge sound? I want you to write a program that has to run in a concurrent environment under Byzantine circumstances where any adversary can invoke your program with … Continue reading Zeus: Analyzing safety of smart contracts
Category: Uncategorized
Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations
Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations Andreou et al., NDSS’18 Let me start out by saying that I think it’s good Facebook are making an effort to provide more transparency to advertising. It’s good that Twitter announced they will do something similar too. It’s a shame though that … Continue reading Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations
Bug fixes, improvements, … and privacy leaks
Bug fixes, improvements, ... and privacy leaks. A longitudinal study of PII leaks across Android app versions Ren et al., NDSS’18 It’s another cut of similar data today, but this time looking at how privacy information is leaked over time in different versions of an (Android mobile) app. You probably don’t need to read the … Continue reading Bug fixes, improvements, … and privacy leaks
Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem
Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem Razaghpanah et al., NDSS’18 Sadly you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this study reveals user tracking is widespread within the mobile app (Android) ecosystem. The focus is on third-party services included in apps, identified by the network domains they try … Continue reading Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem
Towards web-based delta synchronization for cloud storage systems
Towards web-based delta synchronization for cloud storage systems Xiao et al., FAST’18 If you use Dropbox (or an equivalent service) to synchronise file between your Mac or PC and the cloud, then it uses an efficient delta-sync (rsync) protocol to only upload the parts of a file that have changed. If you use a web … Continue reading Towards web-based delta synchronization for cloud storage systems
Clay codes: moulding MDS codes to yield an MSR code
Clay codes: moulding MDS codes to yield an MSR code Vajha et al., FAST’18 As we know, storage fails (or the nodes to which it is directly attached, which amounts to pretty much the same thing). Assuming we can detect the failure, we need to recover from it. In order to be able to recover, … Continue reading Clay codes: moulding MDS codes to yield an MSR code
Barrier-enabled IO stack for Flash storage
Barrier-enabled IO stack for flash storage Won et al., FAST’18 The performance of Flash storage has benefited greatly from concurrency and parallelism - for example, multi-channel controllers, large caches, and deep command queues. At the same time, the time to program an individual Flash cell has stayed fairly static (and even become slightly worse in … Continue reading Barrier-enabled IO stack for Flash storage
Protocol aware recovery for consensus-based storage
Protocol aware recovery for consensus based storage Alagappan et al., FAST’18 Following on from their excellent previous work on ‘All file systems are not created equal’ (well worth a read if you haven’t encountered it yet), in this paper the authors look at how well some of our most reliable protocols — those used in … Continue reading Protocol aware recovery for consensus-based storage
Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems
Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems Gunawi et al., FAST’18 The first thing that strikes you about this paper is the long list of authors from multiple different establishments. That’s because it’s actually a study of 101 different fail-slow hardware incidents collected across large-scale cluster deployments in 12 different … Continue reading Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems
As we may think
As we may think Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic, 1945 To close out the week, here’s another selection from the ‘Great moments in computing’ list - and it’s a true classic. Bush’s article was written in 1945 when he was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development coordinating the work of about six thousand … Continue reading As we may think
the morning paper 