Volume 21, Issue 4 - Confidential Computing

Operations and Life:
Knowing What You Neeed to Know

  Thomas A. Limoncelli

Personal, team, and organizational effectiveness can be improved with a little preparation

Blockers can take a tiny task and stretch it over days or weeks. Taking a moment at the beginning of a project to look for and prevent possible blockers can improve productivity. These examples of personal, team, and organizational levels show how gathering the right information and performing preflight checks can save hours of wasted time later.

Business and Management, Operations and Life

Kode Vicious:
Halfway Around the World

Learn the language, meet the people, eat the food

Not only do different cultures treat different features differently, but they also treat each other differently. How people act with respect to each other is a topic that can, and does, fill volumes of books that, as nerds, we probably have never read, but finding out a bit about where you're heading is a good idea. You can try to ask the locals, although people generally are so enmeshed in their own cultures that they have a hard time explaining them to others. It's best to observe with an open mind, watch how your new team reacts to each other and to you, and then ask simple questions when you see something you don't understand.

Business and Management, Kode Vicious

Drill Bits
Protecting Secrets from Computers

  Terence Kelly

Bob is in prison and Alice is dead; they trusted computers with secrets. Review time-tested tricks that can help you avoid the grim fate of the old crypto couple.

Code, Development, Drill Bits, Privacy and Rights, Security, Web Security

Confidential Computing: Elevating Cloud Security and Privacy

  Mark Russinovich

Working toward a more secure and innovative future

Confidential Computing (CC) fundamentally improves our security posture by drastically reducing the attack surface of systems. While traditional systems encrypt data at rest and in transit, CC extends this protection to data in use. It provides a novel, clearly defined security boundary, isolating sensitive data within trusted execution environments during computation. This means services can be designed that segment data based on least-privilege access principles, while all other code in the system sees only encrypted data. Crucially, the isolation is rooted in novel hardware primitives, effectively rendering even the cloud-hosting infrastructure and its administrators incapable of accessing the data. This approach creates more resilient systems capable of withstanding increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, thereby reinforcing data protection and sovereignty in an unprecedented manner.

Data, Hardware, Security

Hardware VM Isolation in the Cloud

  David Kaplan

Enabling confidential computing with AMD SEV-SNP technology

Confidential computing is a security model that fits well with the public cloud. It enables customers to rent VMs while enjoying hardware-based isolation that ensures that a cloud provider cannot purposefully or accidentally see or corrupt their data. SEV-SNP was the first commercially available x86 technology to offer VM isolation for the cloud and is deployed in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. As confidential computing technologies such as SEV-SNP develop, confidential computing is likely to simply become the default trust model for the cloud.

Data, Hardware, Security

Creating the First Confidential GPUs

  Gobikrishna Dhanuskodi, Sudeshna Guha, Vidhya Krishnan, Aruna Manjunatha, Michael O'Connor, Rob Nertney, Phil Rogers

The team at NVIDIA brings confidentiality and integrity to user code and data for accelerated computing.

Today's datacenter GPU has a long and storied 3D graphics heritage. In the 1990s, graphics chips for PCs and consoles had fixed pipelines for geometry, rasterization, and pixels using integer and fixed-point arithmetic. In 1999, NVIDIA invented the modern GPU, which put a set of programmable cores at the heart of the chip, enabling rich 3D scene generation with great efficiency. It did not take long for developers and researchers to realize I could run compute on those parallel cores, and it would be blazing fast. In 2004, Ian Buck created Brook at Stanford, the first compute library for GPUs, and in 2006, NVIDIA created CUDA, which is the gold standard for accelerated computing on GPUs today.

Data, Hardware, Security

Why Should I Trust Your Code?

  Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Cédric Fournet, Kapil Vaswani, Sylvan Clebsch, Maik Riechert, Manuel Costa, Mark Russinovich

Working toward a more secure and innovative future

Confidential computing enables users to authenticate code running in TEEs, but users also need evidence this code is trustworthy.

For Confidential Computing to become ubiquitous in the cloud, in the same way that HTTPS became the default for networking, a different, more flexible approach is needed. Although there is no guarantee that every malicious code behavior will be caught upfront, precise auditability can be guaranteed: Anyone who suspects that trust has been broken by a confidential service should be able to audit any part of its attested code base, including all updates, dependencies, policies, and tools. To achieve this, we propose an architecture to track code provenance and to hold code providers accountable. At its core, a new Code Transparency Service (CTS) maintains a public, append-only ledger that records all code deployed for confidential services. Before registering new code, CTS automatically applies policies to enforce code-integrity properties. For example, it can enforce the use of authorized releases of library dependencies and verify that code has been compiled with specific runtime checks and analyzed by specific tools. These upfront checks prevent common supply-chain attacks.

Data, Hardware, Security

 

Volume 21, Issue 3

Kode Vicious:
Stone Knives and Bear Skins

There is no money in tools.

If you look at the software tooling landscape, you see that the majority of developers work with either open-source tools (LLVM and gcc for compilers, gdb for debugger, vi/vim or Emacs for editor); or tools from the recently reformed home of proprietary software, Microsoft, which has figured out that its Visual Studio Code system is a good way to sucker people into working with its platforms; or finally Apple, whose tools are meant only for its platform. In specialized markets, such as deeply embedded, military, and aerospace, there are proprietary tools that are often far worse than their open-source cousins, because the market for such tools is small but lucrative.

If systems were designed with these questions in mind (How do I extend this? How do I measure this? How do I debug this?), it would also be easier to build better tools. The tooling would have something to hang its hat on, rather than guessing what might be the meaning of some random bytes in memory. Is that a buffer? Is it an important buffer? Who knows, it's all memory!

Kode Vicious, Tools

Pointers in Far Memory

  Ethan Miller, George Neville-Neil, Achilles Benetopoulos, Pankaj Mehra, and Daniel Bittman

A rethink of how data and computations should be organized

CXL (Compute Express Link), a new technology emerging from the hardware side, is promising to provide far memory. Thus, there will be more memory capacity and perhaps even more bandwidth, but at the expense of greater latency. Optimization will first, seek to keep memory in far tiers colder, and, second, minimize the rates of both access into and promotion out of these tiers. Third, proactive promotion and demotion techniques being developed for far memory promote/demote whole objects instead of one cache line at a time to take advantage of bulk caching and eviction in order to avoid repeatedly incurring its long latency. Finally, offloading computations with many dependent accesses to a near-memory processor is already being seen as a way to keep the latency of memory out of the denominator of application throughput. With far memory, this will be a required optimization.

Effectively exploiting emerging far-memory technology requires consideration of operating on richly connected data outside the context of the parent process. Operating-system technology in development offers help by exposing abstractions such as memory objects and globally invariant pointers that can be traversed by devices and newly instantiated compute. Such ideas will allow applications running on future heterogeneous distributed systems with disaggregated memory nodes to exploit near-memory processing for higher performance and to independently scale their memory and compute resources for lower cost.

Data, Hardware, Memory

The Bikeshed:
Don't "Think of the Internet!"

  Poul-Henning Kamp

No human right is absolute.

The "Think of the children!" trope is often rolled out because the lobbyists cannot be honest and say that their real agenda is "No universal human rights for those people." So we should examine whether "Think of the Internet as we know it!" is also political codespeak.

The Bikeshed, Privacy and Rights

How Flexible is CXL's Memory Protection?

  Samuel W. Stark, A. Theodore Markettos, Simon W. Moore

Replacing a sledgehammer with a scalpel

CXL, a new interconnect standard for cache-coherent memory sharing, is becoming a reality - but its security leaves something to be desired. Decentralized capabilities are flexible and resilient against malicious actors, and should be considered while CXL is under active development.

Memory, Security

Bridging the Moat:
Security Mismatch

  Phil Vachon

Security must be a business enabler, not a hinderer.

Information security teams that say 'no' need to change. Hiding behind a moat makes repelling attacks easy, but bridges allow you to replenish supplies and foster relationships with customers? castles. Remember, a security team's role is to empower their business to move forward with confidence, not to hinder progress.

Business and Management, Bridging the Moat

The Soft Side of Software:
Managing Hybrid Teams

  Kate Matsudaira

The combination of on-site and remote workers takes extra effort from team leaders.

After three years of working remotely, many companies are asking their people to return to the office. Not everyone is coming back, however. With some people in the office and some still working from home, leaders must get this transition to hybrid work right. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds in some ways. You can easily end up creating two experiences, which can lead to problems that will compound over time and have long-term damaging effects on your team. For leaders who are navigating a newly hybridized work environment, this column presents the following recommendations to help make sure your team is as functional as possible.

Business and Management, The Soft Side of Software

Echoes of Intelligence

  Alvaro Videla

Textual interpretation and large language models

We are now in the presence of a new medium disguised as good old text, but that text has been generated by an LLM, without authorial intention—an aspect that, if known beforehand, completely changes the expectations and response a human should have from a piece of text. Should our interpretation capabilities be engaged? If yes, under what conditions? The rules of the language game should be spelled out; they should not be passed over in silence.

AI

 

Volume 21, Issue 2

You Don't know Jack about Application Performance

  David Collier-Brown

Knowing whether you're doomed to fail is important when starting a project.

You don't need to do a full-scale benchmark any time you have a performance or capacity planning problem. A simple measurement will provide the bottleneck point of your system: The example program will get significantly slower after eight requests per second per CPU. That's often enough to tell you the most important thing: if you're going to fail.

Performance Testing

Cargo Cult AI

  Edlyn V. Levine

Is the ability to think scientifically the defining essence of intelligence?

Evidence abounds that the human brain does not innately think scientifically; however, it can be taught to do so. The same species that forms cargo cults around widespread and unfounded beliefs in UFOs, ESP, and anything read on social media also produces scientific luminaries such as Sagan and Feynman. Today's cutting-edge LLMs are also not innately scientific. But unlike the human brain, there is good reason to believe they never will be unless new algorithmic paradigms are developed.

AI

Kode Vicious:
The Human Touch

There is no substitute for good, direct, honest training.

The challenge of providing a safe communications environment in the face of such social engineering attacks isn't just the technology; it's also people. As anyone who has done serious work in computer security knows, the biggest problems are between the keyboard and the chair. Most people by default trust other people and are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Business and Management, Kode Vicious, Security

Research for Practice:
OS Scheduling

  Kostis Kaffes with Introduction by Peter Alvaro

Better scheduling policies for modern computing systems

In any system that multiplexes resources, the problem of scheduling what computations run where and when is perhaps the most fundamental. Yet, like many other essential problems in computing (e.g., query optimization in databases), academic research in scheduling moves like a pendulum, with periods of intense activity followed by periods of dormancy when it is considered a "solved" problem. These three papers make significant contributions to an ongoing effort to develop better scheduling policies for modern computing systems. The papers highlight the need for better, more efficient, and more flexible OS schedulers; open up new areas of research; and demonstrate the importance of continued development and innovation in OS scheduling policies.

Research for Practice

Beyond the Repository

  Amanda Casari, Julia Ferraioli, and Juniper Lovato

Best practices for open source ecosystems researchers

Much of the existing research about open source elects to study software repositories instead of ecosystems. An open source repository most often refers to the artifacts recorded in a version control system and occasionally includes interactions around the repository itself. An open source ecosystem refers to a collection of repositories, the community, their interactions, incentives, behavioral norms, and culture. The decentralized nature of open source makes holistic analysis of the ecosystem an arduous task, with communities and identities intersecting in organic and evolving ways. Despite these complexities, the increased scrutiny on software security and supply chains makes it of the utmost importance to take an ecosystem-based approach when performing research about open source. This article provides guidelines and best practices for research using data collected from open source ecosystems, encouraging research teams to work with communities in respectful ways.

Open Source

DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity

  Abi Noda, DX
  Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria
  Nicole Forsgren, Microsoft Research
  Michaela Greiler, DX

The developer-centric approach to measuring and improving productivity

Developer experience focuses on the lived experience of developers and the points of friction they encounter in their everyday work. In addition to improving productivity, DevEx drives business performance through increased efficiency, product quality, and employee retention. This paper provides a practical framework for understanding DevEx, and presents a measurement framework that combines feedback from developers with data about the engineering systems they interact with. These two frameworks provide leaders with clear, actionable insights into what to measure and where to focus in order to improve developer productivity.

Business and Management

Operations and Life:
Improvement on End-to-End Encryption
May Lead to Silent Revolution

  Thomas A. Limoncelli

Researchers are on the brink of what could be
the next big improvement in communication privacy.

Privacy is an increasing concern, whether you are texting with a business associate or transmitting volumes of data over the Internet. Over the past few decades, cryptographic techniques have enabled privacy improvements in chat apps and other electronic forms of communication. Now researchers are on the brink of what could be the next big improvement in communication privacy: E2EEEE (End-to-End Encryption with Endpoint Elimination). This article is based on interviews with researchers who plan on presenting at a symposium on the topic scheduled for April 1, 2023.

Networks, Operations and Life, Privacy, Security

 

Volume 21, Issue 1

Designing a Framework for Conversational Interfaces

  Zachary Tellman

Combining the latest advances in machine learning with earlier approaches

Wherever possible, business logic should be described by code rather than training data. This keeps our system's behavior principled, predictable, and easy to change. Our approach to conversational interfaces allows them to be built much like any other application, using familiar tools, conventions, and processes, while still taking advantage of cutting-edge machine-learning techniques.

AI, Data, HCI

Kode Vicious:
The Parchment Path?

Is there ever a time when learning is not of value—for its own sake?

The greater the risk, the greater the reward, and if you do succeed, it will be an achievement that you can look back on and smile wryly about. Postdocs never laugh because postdocs are post-laughter. However, there are some things to consider before plunking down your application fee and writing all those essays.

Education, Kode Vicious

Opportunity Cost and Missed Chances in Optimizing Cybersecurity

  Kelly Shortridge, Josiah Dykstra

The loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen

Opportunity cost should not be an afterthought when making security decisions. One way to ease into considering complex alternatives is to consider the null baseline of doing nothing instead of the choice at hand. Opportunity cost can feel abstract, elusive, and imprecise, but it can be understood by everyone, given the right introduction and framing. Using the approach presented here will make it natural and accessible.

Networks, Security

Drill Bits
Catch-23: The New C Standard
Sets the World on Fire

  Terence Kelly with Special Guest Borer Yekai Pan

A new major revision of the C programming language standard is nearly upon us. C23 introduces pleasant conveniences, retains venerable traps for the unwary, and innovates a gratuitous catastrophe. A few steps forward, much sideways shuffling, and a drunken backward stumble into the fireplace come together in the official dance of C standardization, the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Drill Bits, Code, Development

Sharpening Your Tools

  Simson Garfinkel, Jon Stewart

Updating bulk_extractor for the 2020s

This article presents our experience updating the high-performance Digital forensics tool BE (bulk_extractor) a decade after its initial release. Between 2018 and 2022, we updated the program from C++98 to C++17. We also performed a complete code refactoring and adopted a unit test framework. DF tools must be frequently updated to keep up with changes in the ways they are used. A description of updates to the bulk_extractor tool serves as an example of what can and should be done.

Code Testing, Tools,

Case Study
More Than Just Algorithms

A discussion with Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, Chris Wiggins, Jeannette Wing, Ben Fried, and Michael Tingley

Dramatic advances in the ability to gather, store, and process data have led to the rapid growth of data science and its mushrooming impact on nearly all aspects of the economy and society. Data science has also had a huge effect on academic disciplines with new research agendas, new degrees, and organizational entities. The authors of a new textbook, Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities, share their ideas about the impact of the field on nearly all aspects of the economy and society.

Case studies, Data

 

Volume 20, Issue 6

Kode Vicious:
All Sliders to the Right

Hardware overkill

There are many reasons why this year's model isn't any better than last year's, and many reasons why performance fails to scale, some of which KV has covered in these pages. It is true that the days of upgrading every year and getting a free performance boost are long gone, as we're not really getting single cores that are faster than about 4GHz. One thing that many software developers fail to understand is the hardware on which their software runs at a sufficiently deep level.

Hardware, Kode Vicious, Performance

Three-part Harmony for Program Managers
Who Just Don't Get It, Yet

  Guenever Aldrich, Danny Tsang, Jason Mckenney

Open-source software, open standards, and agile software development

This article examines three tools in the system acquisitions toolbox that can work to expedite development and procurement while mitigating programmatic risk: OSS, open standards, and the Agile/Scrum software development processes are all powerful additions to the DoD acquisition program management toolbox.

Development, Systems Administration

Research for Practice:
The Fun in Fuzzing

  Stefan Nagy, with Introduction By Peter Alvaro

The debugging technique comes into its own.

Stefan Nagy, an assistant professor in the Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah, takes us on a tour of recent research in software fuzzing, or the systematic testing of programs via the generation of novel or unexpected inputs. The first paper he discusses extends the state of the art in coverage-guided fuzzing with the semantic notion of "likely invariants," inferred via techniques from property-based testing. The second explores encoding domain-specific knowledge about certain bug classes into test-case generation. His last selection takes us through the looking glass, randomly generating entire C programs and using differential analysis to compare traces of optimized and unoptimized executions, in order to find bugs in the compilers themselves.

Research for Practice, Testing

To PiM or Not to PiM

  Gabriel Falcao And João Dinis Ferreira

The case for in-memory inferencing of quantized CNNs at the edge

As artificial intelligence becomes a pervasive tool for the billions of IoT (Internet of things) devices at the edge, the data movement bottleneck imposes severe limitations on the performance and autonomy of these systems. PiM (processing-in-memory) is emerging as a way of mitigating the data movement bottleneck while satisfying the stringent performance, energy efficiency, and accuracy requirements of edge imaging applications that rely on CNNs (convolutional neural networks).

AI, Data, Networks, Performance

Taking Flight with Copilot

  Christian Bird, Denae Ford, Thomas Zimmermann, Nicole Forsgren, Eirini Kalliamvakou, Travis Lowdermilk, Idan Gazit

Early insights and opportunities of AI-powered pair-programming tools

Over the next five years, AI-powered tools likely will be helping developers in many diverse tasks. For example, such models may be used to improve code review, directing reviewers to parts of a change where review is most needed or even directly providing feedback on changes. Models such as Codex may suggest fixes for defects in code, build failures, or failing tests. These models are able to write tests automatically, helping to improve code quality and downstream reliability of distributed systems. This study of Copilot shows that developers spend more time reviewing code than actually writing code. As AI-powered tools are integrated into more software development tasks, developer roles will shift so that more time is spent assessing suggestions related to the task than doing the task itself.

AI, Development

 

 

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