Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions

March 9, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions Roos et al., NDSS’18 Peer-to-peer path-based-transaction (PBT) networks such as the Lightning Network address scalability, efficiency, and interoperability concerns with blockchains through off-chain transactions. They work by establishing decentralised chains of participants through which payments are routed. A PBT network builds on top of ... Continue Reading

Zeus: Analyzing safety of smart contracts

March 8, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

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

Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations

March 7, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

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

Bug fixes, improvements, … and privacy leaks

March 6, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

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

Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem

March 5, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

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

Towards web-based delta synchronization for cloud storage systems

March 2, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

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

Clay codes: moulding MDS codes to yield an MSR code

March 1, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Barrier-enabled IO stack for Flash storage

February 28, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Protocol aware recovery for consensus-based storage

February 27, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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

Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems

February 26, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

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

the morning paper

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