Charles Christian Miers

A Quantitative Analysis of Current Security Concerns and Solutions for Cloud Computing

The development of cloud computing services is speeding up the rate in which the organizations outsource their computational services or sell their idle computational resources. Even though migrating to the cloud remains a tempting trend from a financial perspective, there are several other aspects that must be taken into account by companies before they decide to do so. One of the most important aspect refers to security: while some cloud computing security issues are inherited from the solutions adopted to create such services, many new security questions that are particular to these solutions also arise, including those related to how the services are organized and which kind of service/data can be placed in the cloud. Aiming to give a better understanding of this complex scenario, in this article we identify and classify the main security concerns and solutions in cloud computing, and propose a taxonomy of security in cloud computing, giving an overview of the current status of security in this emerging technology.

A Multimedia Delivery Architecture for IPTV with P2P-Based Time-Shift Support

From the four basic functionalities of video delivery systems - linear TV, Video on Demand (VoD), time-shifted TV (tsTV), and network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR) - most of todays solutions focus either on linear TV, or on VoD. While linear TV usually uses efficient distribution mechanisms such as multicast, VoD is often realized via centralized, bandwidth-inefficient unicast. Even when file sharing P2P algorithms are used for VoD or nPVR, they can not be applied to tsTV since they require the whole content to exist from the beginning. With this paper, we propose a novel solution that aims at offering all four functionalities in one distributed system. Our architecture uses multicast for the distribution of live content, and a modified P2P protocol for offering VoD, nPVR, and tsTV altogether.

A Framework for Authentication and Authorization Credentials in Cloud Computing

Security is a key concern when adopting cloud technology. Cloud solutions include not only issues inherited from related technologies, such as virtualization and distributed computing, but also new concerns associated to complexity of the cloud ecosystem, composed by the cloud entities and their interactions. One of the concerns is related to authentication and authorization in the cloud in order to provide robust mechanisms to identify entities and establish their permissions and roles in the cloud, controlling resource usage and promoting accounting and isolation. This paper identifies the state of the art in terms of credential management focusing on the cloud ecosystem. It proposes a credential classification and a framework for studying and developing solutions in this context, unifying concepts related to cloud deployment models, service types, entities and lifecycle controls.

I2TS01 - A Taxonomy for Locality Algorithms on Peer-to-Peer Networks

The continuous growth of peer-to-peer networks has made them responsible for a considerable portion of the current Internet traffic. For this reason, improvements in P2P network resources usage are of central importance. One effective approach for addressing this issue is the deployment of locality algorithms, which allow the system to optimize the peers selection policy for different network situations and, thus, maximize performance. To date, several locality algorithms have been proposed for use in P2P networks. However, they usually adopt heterogeneous criteria for measuring the proximity between peers, which hinders a coherent comparison between the different solutions. In this paper, we develop a thoroughly review of popular locality algorithms, based on three main characteristics: the adopted network architecture, distance metric, and resulting peer selection algorithm. As result of this study, we propose a novel and generic taxonomy for locality algorithms in peer-to-peer networks, aiming to enable a better and more coherent evaluation of any individual locality algorithm.

Cloud resource management: towards efficient execution of large-scale scientific applications and workflows on complex infrastructures

Cloud computing evolved from the concept of utility computing, which is defined as the provision of computational and storage resources as a metered service. Another key characteristic of cloud computing is multitenancy, which enables resource and cost sharing among a large pool of users. Characteristics such as multitenancy and elasticity perfectly fit the requirements of modern data-intensive research and scientific endeavors. In parallel, as science relies on the analysis of very large data sets, data management and processing must be performed in a scalable and automated way. Workflows have emerged as a way to formalize and structure data analysis, thus becoming an increasingly popular paradigm for scientists to handle complex scientific processes. One of the key enablers of this conjunction of cloud computing and scientific workflows is resource management. However, several issues related to data-intensive loads, complex infrastructures such as hybrid and multicloud environments to support large-scale execution of workflows, performance fluctuations, and reliability, pose as challenges to truly position clouds as viable high-performance infrastructures for scientific computing. This paper presents a survey on cloud resource management that provides an extensive study of the field. A taxonomy is proposed to analyze the selected works and the analysis ultimately leads to the definition of gaps and future challenges to be addressed by research and development.

Fog computing: Data analytics and cloud distributed processing on the network edges

The term fog computing was coined in 2012. However, the concept of pushing data and application logic to the network edges is not a novelty. Similar proposals were observed with edge computing, from the early 2000s, and cloudlets, from 2009. In fact, the cloudlet concept is a subset of edge computing applied to mobile networks and the fog concept is a subset of edge computing applied to Internet of Things (IoT). This paper demystifies these concepts and provides a comprehensive survey of references from academia and industry. It analyzes the terminology and dimensions of performance, security, and governance, based on a taxonomy proposed and presented in the paper. In addition we provide a thorough analysis of related topics, identifying the main research areas correlated to edge computing. Finally, we draw conclusions regarding the state of the art and the future of edge computing.

EbitSim: An Enhanced BitTorrent Simulation Using OMNeT++ 4

The BitTorrent protocol is one of the most successful P2P applications, being largely studied by the research community. Nevertheless, studying the dynamics of a large BitTorrent network presents several challenges, such as difficulty in acquiring network traces or building measurement experiments. Evaluation through simulation is usually utilized for studying BitTorrent networks, yet only a few BitTorrent simulation models are available for the research community. In this article, we present an extensible framework for developing BitTorrent simulations, focusing on realism and without losing on scalability. We developed an accurate version of the protocol by analyzing the source code of mainstream BitTorrent clients and by discussing directly with their developers. The simulation model was developed with the OMNeT++ Framework, inheriting its high extensibility, and with the INET Framework, for accuracy of the underlying network model. We also took into account the effects of multitasking in our model, since BitTorrent applications acquires content from several sources simultaneously, and utilized real world traces for modeling the processing times. We present an analysis of our simulator regarding performance aspects and BitTorrent-related results.

Key Issues on Future Internet

The Internet has changed the way people live and interact with others. Everyday, an ever-increasing number of activities can be conducted through a myriad of Internet-connected devices. It is possible to foresee a Future Internet environment centered on users, where a variety of devices benefit from ubiquitous connectivity to augment every aspect of people’s life. An incredible amount of applications will be created in a user-driven approach to provide data and services in a user centric way. These applications and services could be sold and used by other users to create their own new applications producing new information and services in an amazing speed. This scenario has far-reaching technological, economical, social and political implications. This chapter presents the main trends and challenges to be faced towards a more ubiquitous, interactive and user-centered Future Internet.

QoS-Aware Virtual Infrastructures Allocation on SDN-based Clouds

Virtualization of computing and communication infrastructureswere disseminated as possible solutions for networksevolution and deployment of new services on clouddata centers. Although promising, their effective applicationfaces obstacles, mainly caused by rigidity on the managementof communication resources. Currently, the Software-DefinedNetworks (SDN) paradigm has been popularizing customizationand flexibility in network management due to separationof control and data planes. However, benefits introduced bySDN are not trivially applied to Virtual Infrastructures (VIs)provisioning on SDN-based cloud providers. An allocationmechanism needs joint information of control and data planesin order to deliver Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware mappingswhile achieving provider objectives. In this work, we formulatethe online VI allocation on SDN-based cloud data centers as aMixed Integer Program (MIP). Following, integer constraintsare relaxed to obtain a linear program, and rounding techniquesare applied. The mechanism performs VI allocation consideringlatency, bandwidth, and virtual machine requirements. The results indicate that the VIs mean internal latency can bereduced while simultaneously enforcing other QoS constraints.

A Cost Model for IaaS Clouds based on Virtual Machine Energy Consumption

Cloud Computing has revolutionized the software, platform and infrastructure provisioning. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers offer on-demand and configurable Virtual Machine (VMs) to tenants of cloud computing services. A key consolidation force that widespread IaaS deployment is the use of pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-use cost models. In these models, a service price can be composed of two dimensions: the individual consumption, and a proportional value charged for service maintenance. A common practice for public providers is to dilute both capital and operational costs on predefined pricing sheets. In this context, we propose PSVE (Proportional-Shared Virtual Energy), a cost model for IaaS providers based on CPU energy consumption. Aligned with traditional commodity prices, PSVE is composed of two key elements: an individualized cost accounted from CPU usage of VMs (e.g., processing and networking), and a shared cost from common hypervisor management operations, proportionally distributed among VMs.