Håvard D. Johansen

Fireflies: scalable support for intrusion-tolerant network overlays

This paper describes and evaluates Fireflies, a scalable protocol for supporting intrusion-tolerant network overlays. While such a protocol cannot distinguish Byzantine nodes from correct nodes in general, Fireflies provides correct nodes with a reasonably current view of which nodes are live, as well as a pseudo-random mesh for communication. The amount of data sent by correct nodes grows linearly with the aggregate rate of failures and recoveries, even if provoked by Byzantine nodes. The set of correct nodes form a connected submesh; correct nodes cannot be eclipsed by Byzantine nodes. Fireflies is deployed and evaluated on PlanetLab.

DAVVI: a prototype for the next generation multimedia entertainment platform

In this demo, we present DAVVI, a prototype of the next generation multimedia entertainment platform. It delivers multi-quality video content in a torrent-similar way like known systems from Move Networks, Microsoft and Apple do. However, it also provides a brand new, personalized user experience. Through applied search, personalization and recommendation technologies, end-users can efficiently search and retrieve highlights and combine arbitrary events in a customized manner using drag and drop. The created playlists of video segments are then delivered back to the system to improve future search and recommendation results. Here, we demonstrate this system using a soccer example.

Soccer video and player position dataset

This paper presents a dataset of body-sensor traces and corresponding videos from several professional soccer games captured in late 2013 at the Alfheim Stadium in Tromsø, Norway. Player data, including field position, heading, and speed are sampled at 20Hz using the highly accurate ZXY Sport Tracking system. Additional per-player statistics, like total distance covered and distance covered in different speed classes, are also included with a 1Hz sampling rate. The provided videos are in high-definition and captured using two stationary camera arrays positioned at an elevated position above the tribune area close to the center of the field. The camera array is configured to cover the entire soccer field, and each camera can be used individually or as a stitched panorama video. This combination of body-sensor data and videos enables computer-vision algorithms for feature extraction, object tracking, background subtraction, and similar, to be tested against the ground truth contained in the sensor traces.

Multimedia and Medicine: Teammates for Better Disease Detection and Survival

Health care has a long history of adopting technology to save lives and improve the quality of living. Visual information is frequently applied for disease detection and assessment, and the established fields of computer vision and medical imaging provide essential tools. It is, however, a misconception that disease detection and assessment are provided exclusively by these fields and that they provide the solution for all challenges. Integration and analysis of data from several sources, real-time processing, and the assessment of usefulness for end-users are core competences of the multimedia community and are required for the successful improvement of health care systems. We have conducted initial investigations into two use cases surrounding diseases of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, where the detection of abnormalities provides the largest chance of successful treatment if the initial observation of disease indicators occurs before the patient notices any symptoms. Although such detection is typically provided visually by applying an endoscope, we are facing a multitude of new multimedia challenges that differ between use cases. In real-time assistance for colonoscopy, we combine sensor information about camera position and direction to aid in detecting, investigate means for providing support to doctors in unobtrusive ways, and assist in reporting. In the area of large-scale capsular endoscopy, we investigate questions of scalability, performance and energy efficiency for the recording phase, and combine video summarization and retrieval questions for analysis.

Search-based composition, streaming and playback of video archive content

Locating content in existing video archives is both a time and bandwidth consuming process since users might have to download and manually watch large portions of superfluous videos. In this paper, we present two novel prototypes using an Internet based video composition and streaming system with a keyword-based search interface that collects, converts, analyses, indexes, and ranks video content. At user requests, the system can automatically sequence out portions of single videos or aggregate content from multiple videos to produce a single, personalized video stream on-the-fly.

Environment mobility: moving the desktop around

In this position paper, we focus on issues related to middleware support for software mobility in ad hoc and pervasive systems. In particular, we are interested in moving the computational environment of a mobile user following his or her trajectory. We present details of WAIFARER, a prototype implementation that automatically saves and restores application level state to support this mobility. Security, integrity, and fault-tolerance are just some of the key problems that need to be addressed in the future.

Secure Abstraction with Code Capabilities

We propose embedding executable code fragments in cryptographically protected capabilities to enable flexible discretionary access control in cloud-like computing infrastructures. We demonstrate how such a code capability mechanism can be implemented completely in user space. Using a novel combination of X.509 certificates and JavaScript code, code capabilities support restricted delegation, confinement, revocation, and rights amplification for secure abstraction.

FirePatch: Secure and Time-Critical Dissemination of Software Patches*

Because software security patches contain information about vulnerabilities, they can be reverse engineered into exploits. Tools for doing this already exist. As a result, there is a race between hackers and end-users to obtain patches first. In this paper we present and evaluate FirePatch, an intrusion-tolerant dissemination mechanism that combines encryption, replication, and sandboxing such that end-users are able to win the security patch race.

Enforcing Privacy Policies with Meta-Code

This paper proposes a mechanism for expressing and enforcing security policies for shared data. Security policies are expressed as stateful meta-code operations; meta-code can express a broad class of policies, including access-based policies, use-based policies, obligations, and sticky policies with declassification. The meta-code is interposed in the filesystem access path to ensure policy compliance. The generality and feasibility of our approach is demonstrated using a sports analytics prototype system.

Fireflies: A Secure and Scalable Membership and Gossip Service

An attacker who controls a computer in an overlay network can effectively control the entire overlay network if the mechanism managing membership information can successfully be targeted. This article describes Fireflies, an overlay network protocol that fights such attacks by organizing members in a verifiable pseudorandom structure so that an intruder cannot incorrectly modify the membership views of correct members. Fireflies provides each member with a view of the entire membership, and supports networks with moderate total churn. We evaluate Fireflies using both simulations and PlanetLab to show that Fireflies is a practical approach for secure membership maintenance in such networks.