Kenji Hori

Proposal and evaluation of data reduction method for tracing based pre-patch impact analysis

Patching of applications on servers and PCs is a significant source of expense and frustration for IT staff. Organizations are concerned that patches will negatively impact the stability of their existing applications, and this concern results in significant delays in applying patches to publicly announced vulnerabilities of the applications. While Tracing based Pre-patch Impact Analysis method (T-PIA) is an effective way of measuring the actual impact of recent patches on the applications, it causes large storage and bandwidth usage of servers and PCs running the applications. We propose and evaluate a method to reduce such usage caused by T-PIA. Compared to the existing method, our method reduces storage and bandwidth usage by 83 and 89%, respectively. This verifies the ability of our method to reduce such usage.

Customer Equipment Configuration Manager for Managed Network Service Providers

Nowadays, many enterprises want to deploy Managed Network Services (MNS) so that their corporate resources are dedicated to their core businesses. Configuration management of network elements (NE) is a prerequisite of other parts of MNS, though it requires onsite personnel and is labor-intensive, so those systems that remotely and automatically manage NE configurations in behalf of MNS Providers (MNSPs)1 onsite personnel can help reduce service cost. However, the existing systems for this purpose, in which a monolithic server daemon serves for the entire customer base, cannot necessarily ensure independence of the service continuity for each customer, because an unexpected halt of service to a customer can bring the entire system down with it. We offer a customer equipment configuration management system (CECM), which allows MNSPs to remotely and automatically manage configurations of thousands of NEs geographically scattered in many sites simultaneously, while ensuring the independence of the service continuity CECM achieves this by adopting a novel Process-Per-Service (PPS) architecture, in which a set of independent system processes is exclusively used for the management of a customers NE configurations. We also implement a prototype system to show the worst-case performance of CECM. The result shows that the configuration of 1000 emulated NEs for 100 customers can be simultaneously set within 45 seconds. While these results are preliminary, they suggest that CECM can help reduce service cost of providing MNSs.

Pinpointing patch impact test targets of web server systems

The greatest bottleneck in the updating of software programs (i.e. patching) is the time required to test a patched subset of systems for stability before rolling out the patch to all systems. For web servers, comprehensive tests are required for all web content. Even if we knew which modules would be updated by a patch, these tests would be unavoidable because we could not necessarily know the relationship between the web contents and web server modules. To reduce the test operation steps to perform, we propose a method of identifying the specific subset of web content and the web server modules that might be affected by a patch by identifying the relationship between the contents and modules. To estimate how much of a reduction could be made in the test operation steps, we conducted an evaluation using an actual web server system, which provides six web content groups. Our method identified that 23% of the web server modules were used by only one web content group. If we assume a patch would replaces these modules, the expected reduction in the test steps was 83% of the steps required to test all web content groups. The evaluation results implied that our method was effective in reducing the number of test steps.