Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-17T02:44:49Z

Mchou2:

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

=== Crime and Punishment ===
This is just a little placeholder for some thoughts before I post them to the main page.

'''Limiting capabilities'''
Anil mentioned in class the possibility of revoking or limiting capabilities if a user/computer has been found to be guilty of a crime. For example, the computer could somehow lose its ability to perform encryption or secure communications. Somewhat related is the idea of cpu-throttling by performing additional work (explained in the section below).

'''Proof-of-Work'''
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

'''Unique identifiers'''
How are machines identified? Although this problem is related to attribution and there's another team working on it, we can make some basic assumptions that each machine is identifiable. This identifier should be able to survive a reformat, but buying a new machine would get you a new identifier. We might argue that this is fine, because all we're trying to do is raise the price an attacker has to pay to commit a crime (i.e., buy more machines).

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

Reading into the decisions they have made to update the CFAA brings up topics of how users who "intentionally" do harm, as well as users unknowingly participating, or even attempting to help the system by hurting it and fixing it ([http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639668 Morris]).

Another note is that how there are laws and rules being made for humans to be penalized for such negative cyber actions, but even before penalty, it is important to setup a secure enough system that will try to mitigate such negative actions that can take place.Just as how workers in a business must be educated on detecting malicious software and other vulnerabilities in order to further secure the system. By setting up stand alone protection on each system would prevent the need to punish certain acts since they would be impossible to occur. [http://www.witsa.org/papers/McConnell-cybercrime.pdf Law is only part of the answer]

==Concept: Justice Web==

The Justice Web is a possible implementation that uses the research we have done so far. It is essentially an incrementally-deployable network system that shares resources with users within the same Justice Web, based on a morality rating. Evidence is logged so that those within the Web may be held accountable, and those without may be recorded and watched for future misbehaviour.

===What it is===

The Justice Web is an implementation that treats a network as a distributed system. Resources are shared among the users, based on some measure of trust. As the web grows, more computers become linked to each other within the web, making it harder to manage trust given to each member of the Web. Also, the Web should provide some shared protection for those within the network against external attacks.

Because of this, some sort of Justice System is needed to process evidence and sentence malicious computers. The Justice Web would need a computer or computers to act as the judge. After the judgement, the Justice Web would then need to enforce a penalty on the offender.

===What it does===

The Justice Web links multiple computers together to act as a distributed system. the amount of resources allotted to a member is dependent on their moral rating and trust. The most trusted computer would possibly be the leader of the Web, acting as the judge. To gather evidence a log is kept at each implementation node. This evidence is encrypted so that the user cannot tamper with it.

The evidence is collected by the Justice Web, and handled by members with high level of trust. That is to say, the high computers within the system would essentially be able to define how much evidence is needed, as well as what punishment is to be handed out. The power high members are not absolute, but are capable of influencing a standard set of rules. Rulings are handled using common law, with a punishment handled in the same way as previous ones, unless explicitly changed by the high members.

After the evidence is processed, and a ruling is made by the high members, the Justice Web must then enforce the punishment. For threats coming from outside the Web, each member of the Web is warned about the offender. Continued communication with the offender will be allowed, but if an infection does occur, the punishment for becoming infected would be more severe.

As for offenders within the system, the morality rating attached to that member is affected, and the amount of trust is decreased. From a practical standpoint, the punishment would involve the restriction of resources accessible to the member, while increasing the workload of the member. The amount of trust increases over time, allowing the member to slowly gain more and more access to resources, but the morality rating would be kept the same so that it is made aware that the member has done wrong in the past.

[http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICDCS.2006.78 Prevent DOS by preventing spoofing]

Also looking at Ingress filtering is also another good method to prevent users on a network from spoofing ips for DOS attacks. [http://delivery.acm.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1145/350000/347560/p295-savage.pdf?key1=347560&key2=5289230031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=134.117.10.200&CFID=14033754&CFTOKEN=82498533 link]

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-17T02:44:37Z

Mchou2:

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

=== Crime and Punishment ===
This is just a little placeholder for some thoughts before I post them to the main page.

'''Limiting capabilities'''
Anil mentioned in class the possibility of revoking or limiting capabilities if a user/computer has been found to be guilty of a crime. For example, the computer could somehow lose its ability to perform encryption or secure communications. Somewhat related is the idea of cpu-throttling by performing additional work (explained in the section below).

'''Proof-of-Work'''
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

'''Unique identifiers'''
How are machines identified? Although this problem is related to attribution and there's another team working on it, we can make some basic assumptions that each machine is identifiable. This identifier should be able to survive a reformat, but buying a new machine would get you a new identifier. We might argue that this is fine, because all we're trying to do is raise the price an attacker has to pay to commit a crime (i.e., buy more machines).

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

Reading into the decisions they have made to update the CFAA brings up topics of how users who "intentionally" do harm, as well as users unknowingly participating, or even attempting to help the system by hurting it and fixing it ([http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639668 Morris]).

Another note is that how there are laws and rules being made for humans to be penalized for such negative cyber actions, but even before penalty, it is important to setup a secure enough system that will try to mitigate such negative actions that can take place.Just as how workers in a business must be educated on detecting malicious software and other vulnerabilities in order to further secure the system. By setting up stand alone protection on each system would prevent the need to punish certain acts since they would be impossible to occur. [http://www.witsa.org/papers/McConnell-cybercrime.pdf Law is only part of the answer]

==Concept: Justice Web==

The Justice Web is a possible implementation that uses the research we have done so far. It is essentially an incrementally-deployable network system that shares resources with users within the same Justice Web, based on a morality rating. Evidence is logged so that those within the Web may be held accountable, and those without may be recorded and watched for future misbehaviour.

===What it is===

The Justice Web is an implementation that treats a network as a distributed system. Resources are shared among the users, based on some measure of trust. As the web grows, more computers become linked to each other within the web, making it harder to manage trust given to each member of the Web. Also, the Web should provide some shared protection for those within the network against external attacks.

Because of this, some sort of Justice System is needed to process evidence and sentence malicious computers. The Justice Web would need a computer or computers to act as the judge. After the judgement, the Justice Web would then need to enforce a penalty on the offender.

===What it does===

The Justice Web links multiple computers together to act as a distributed system. the amount of resources allotted to a member is dependent on their moral rating and trust. The most trusted computer would possibly be the leader of the Web, acting as the judge. To gather evidence a log is kept at each implementation node. This evidence is encrypted so that the user cannot tamper with it.

The evidence is collected by the Justice Web, and handled by members with high level of trust. That is to say, the high computers within the system would essentially be able to define how much evidence is needed, as well as what punishment is to be handed out. The power high members are not absolute, but are capable of influencing a standard set of rules. Rulings are handled using common law, with a punishment handled in the same way as previous ones, unless explicitly changed by the high members.

After the evidence is processed, and a ruling is made by the high members, the Justice Web must then enforce the punishment. For threats coming from outside the Web, each member of the Web is warned about the offender. Continued communication with the offender will be allowed, but if an infection does occur, the punishment for becoming infected would be more severe.

As for offenders within the system, the morality rating attached to that member is affected, and the amount of trust is decreased. From a practical standpoint, the punishment would involve the restriction of resources accessible to the member, while increasing the workload of the member. The amount of trust increases over time, allowing the member to slowly gain more and more access to resources, but the morality rating would be kept the same so that it is made aware that the member has done wrong in the past.

[http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICDCS.2006.78 Prevent DOS by preventing spoofing]
Also looking at Ingress filtering is also another good method to prevent users on a network from spoofing ips for DOS attacks. [http://delivery.acm.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1145/350000/347560/p295-savage.pdf?key1=347560&key2=5289230031&coll=DL&dl=ACM&ip=134.117.10.200&CFID=14033754&CFTOKEN=82498533 link]

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-17T02:40:56Z

Mchou2:

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

=== Crime and Punishment ===
This is just a little placeholder for some thoughts before I post them to the main page.

'''Limiting capabilities'''
Anil mentioned in class the possibility of revoking or limiting capabilities if a user/computer has been found to be guilty of a crime. For example, the computer could somehow lose its ability to perform encryption or secure communications. Somewhat related is the idea of cpu-throttling by performing additional work (explained in the section below).

'''Proof-of-Work'''
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

'''Unique identifiers'''
How are machines identified? Although this problem is related to attribution and there's another team working on it, we can make some basic assumptions that each machine is identifiable. This identifier should be able to survive a reformat, but buying a new machine would get you a new identifier. We might argue that this is fine, because all we're trying to do is raise the price an attacker has to pay to commit a crime (i.e., buy more machines).

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

Reading into the decisions they have made to update the CFAA brings up topics of how users who "intentionally" do harm, as well as users unknowingly participating, or even attempting to help the system by hurting it and fixing it ([http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639668 Morris]).

Another note is that how there are laws and rules being made for humans to be penalized for such negative cyber actions, but even before penalty, it is important to setup a secure enough system that will try to mitigate such negative actions that can take place.Just as how workers in a business must be educated on detecting malicious software and other vulnerabilities in order to further secure the system. By setting up stand alone protection on each system would prevent the need to punish certain acts since they would be impossible to occur. [http://www.witsa.org/papers/McConnell-cybercrime.pdf Law is only part of the answer]

==Concept: Justice Web==

The Justice Web is a possible implementation that uses the research we have done so far. It is essentially an incrementally-deployable network system that shares resources with users within the same Justice Web, based on a morality rating. Evidence is logged so that those within the Web may be held accountable, and those without may be recorded and watched for future misbehaviour.

===What it is===

The Justice Web is an implementation that treats a network as a distributed system. Resources are shared among the users, based on some measure of trust. As the web grows, more computers become linked to each other within the web, making it harder to manage trust given to each member of the Web. Also, the Web should provide some shared protection for those within the network against external attacks.

Because of this, some sort of Justice System is needed to process evidence and sentence malicious computers. The Justice Web would need a computer or computers to act as the judge. After the judgement, the Justice Web would then need to enforce a penalty on the offender.

===What it does===

The Justice Web links multiple computers together to act as a distributed system. the amount of resources allotted to a member is dependent on their moral rating and trust. The most trusted computer would possibly be the leader of the Web, acting as the judge. To gather evidence a log is kept at each implementation node. This evidence is encrypted so that the user cannot tamper with it.

The evidence is collected by the Justice Web, and handled by members with high level of trust. That is to say, the high computers within the system would essentially be able to define how much evidence is needed, as well as what punishment is to be handed out. The power high members are not absolute, but are capable of influencing a standard set of rules. Rulings are handled using common law, with a punishment handled in the same way as previous ones, unless explicitly changed by the high members.

After the evidence is processed, and a ruling is made by the high members, the Justice Web must then enforce the punishment. For threats coming from outside the Web, each member of the Web is warned about the offender. Continued communication with the offender will be allowed, but if an infection does occur, the punishment for becoming infected would be more severe.

As for offenders within the system, the morality rating attached to that member is affected, and the amount of trust is decreased. From a practical standpoint, the punishment would involve the restriction of resources accessible to the member, while increasing the workload of the member. The amount of trust increases over time, allowing the member to slowly gain more and more access to resources, but the morality rating would be kept the same so that it is made aware that the member has done wrong in the past.

[http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICDCS.2006.78 Prevent DOS by preventing spoofing]
Also looking at Ingress filtering is also another good method to prevent users on a network from spoofing ips for DOS attacks.

2011-03-15T08:32:17Z

Mchou2: /* Justice Involving Computers */

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-12T06:57:52Z

Mchou2: /* CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act */

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

===Proof-of-Work===
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

Reading into the decisions they have made to update the CFAA brings up topics of how users who "intentionally" do harm, as well as users unknowingly participating, or even attempting to help the system by hurting it and fixing it ([http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639668 Morris]).

Another note is that how there are laws and rules being made for humans to be penalized for such negative cyber actions, but even before penalty, it is important to setup a secure enough system that will try to mitigate such negative actions that can take place.Just as how workers in a business must be educated on detecting malicious software and other vulnerabilities in order to further secure the system. By setting up stand alone protection on each system would prevent the need to punish certain acts since they would be impossible to occur. [http://www.witsa.org/papers/McConnell-cybercrime.pdf Law is only part of the answer]

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-11T19:04:10Z

Mchou2: /* CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act */

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

===Proof-of-Work===
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

Reading into the decisions they have made to update the CFAA brings up topics of how users who "intentionally" do harm, as well as users unknowingly participating, or even attempting to help the system by hurting it and fixing it ([http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639668 Morris]).

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-11T18:53:12Z

Mchou2: /* Research Documentation */

==Meetings==

===Mar 01===
Early discussions on how we would define justice:
* what are the components of justice?
* should justice involve preventative measure or should it be strictly reactive?

How would evidence be collected and logged?

Discussions on what "punishment" means when referring to computers:
* What can we do to punish or penalize computers?
* Does it make sense to punish computers?

Discussions on how human penal systems work:
* do we want computer justice to be used to dissuade deviant behaviour or should it be used to punish those who have committed "bad" acts?
* should we implement a system that catches/punishes all bad acts or just punish reported acts?
* how will we classify deviant behaviour?
** by the act itself
** by the results of the act

Discussed how there would need to be some sort of hierarchical justice system with figure heads who manage justice activities for their specific region:
* collective internet justice: Justice Web or JLA (Justice Link Assessment)
* each region patrolled by a justice managing unit:
** Internet Batman (Gotham), Internet Superman (Metropolis), etc.

Divided the task of finding research papers into 3 sections:
* current ways to "punish" computers (Matthew)
* ways to collect, log, categorize evidence of inappropriate behaviour (Thomas)
* human methods of justice, various penal systems in our current and historical societies (Mike)

===Mar 03===
Initial discussions focused on how we were having difficulty finding papers related to the concept of justice in computers, so we focused on trying to determine exactly what justice should be in the realm of distributed computing:
* punishing computers is difficult as computers do not care what task they are given, they just complete computations.
* punishing people is not really the focus we need as that is what human laws are for.
* if there is some way to punish a computer, does it make sense to punish computers that are being used for "bad" actions if the owner of the computer is unaware of this activity.
** does this punishment really have a greater effect on the owner of the computer than the computer itself?

Our new focus is to try and narrow down if the concept of justice actually has a place in distributed computing:
* determine what purpose justice would serve...why would we have it?
** if we decide justice is a necessary concept, the focus will become what is a "fair" way to apply punishment for "bad" actions.
** if justice does not have a useful purpose then we must detail the reason that it is not beneficial.

===Mar 08===
*'''Definition of Justice''' - Can we separate the computer punishment from the user punishment?
*'''Transparency''' - keeping "rap sheets" on what systems are doing/have done. If you were wrongfully accused for participating in a malicious attack, this can be clarified
*'''Punishment''' - Computational puzzles for fighting unsolicited inbound traffic.
*'''Morality rating''' - Systems get a "moral rating" that can go up or down. Based on this rating, more or less trust can be given to that system.

Capital punishment?
Financial sanction or imprisonment are our current way of punishment. they're expensive (maintain databases, keeping state, paying for prisons).

bodily harm - limited time to perform. the fact that they've been punished is visible. losing hands, losing eyes, people can see that. information propagates because the authorities make an example of someone.

maybe the solution is to restrict protocols if you have a low morality rating. for e.g., you can restrict encryption and compression, which means anything you do will be publicly visible.

===Mar 10===

* Offender Registration: Global list of morality registered for perusal of other networks.
* Encrypted logs on client-side
** Reporting with tangible evidence
* Compensation for crimes
* virus notification
* detrimental to attacker buying a new computer, rather than total prevention
** assumption that computer can always be identified
* virus as umbrella group for mobile code
** active attackers punished differently from passive attackers
* Research Topics:
** What is Justice?
*** Mike
** Justice in terms of computers.
*** Matthew
** Crime and Punishment.
*** David
** Justice Web
*** Thomas McMahon

==Research Documentation==

===Virtual Punishment===
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

===Theory of Justice===

Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 2003. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kvpby7HtAe0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=concepts+of+justice&ots=tggvx5zc67&sig=s4OHDBhkpDzumtlH0mIUO7cbCys#v=onepage&q=concepts%20of%20justice&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* This book provides a view of Justice that may serve the purpose of distributed computing. Rawls describes justice as serving two primary functions;
1. Assign rights and duties for the basic institutions of society.
2. Describe the best way to distribute the benefits and burdens of society.
*If we take this view of justice, as opposed to a penalty-centric view, then justice may have a place in distributed computing. For our purposes, justice could be the basic guidelines to which all members of a distributed society must conform in order for the system to be stable and efficient. Obviously this view is an "all-in" type approach and may be more difficult to describe in terms of being incrementally deployable.

===The Birth of Prison===
Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Random House, New York, 1995. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pWv1R2o_PWsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=discipline+and+punish&ots=tL8pS67AAh&sig=L9PEOPaNiLAxYCkqF627K1la5Hw#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* Foucault's book focuses on how punishment evolved from medevil methods "draw and quarter" to modern prison methods. These two methods of justiceare differentiated by the way in which punishment is carried out. For medevil, or "Monarchical Punishment", the population is discouraged from doing bad acts by the public, and brutal, way that punishment is exacted. The punishments included torture and executions. On the other hand, Foucault discusses "Disciplinary Punishment" where there are people deemed as experts who have power over the perpetrator of a "bad" act and handle the punishment of the individual. An example of this is a prison guard who determines how long a prisoner stays in jail.
*For a distributed computing system, this provides a couple of ways that justice could be enforced. If we think of the general distributed system as a free zone in which computers can act how they wish but there are laws in place to describe "bad" acts. If a computer is caught and convicted of doing something against the described laws, then the computer could be tortured (forced to provide more resources to other computers), executed (completly removed from the system) or potentially placed under the care of a supervisor computer who will allow the "bad" computer to continue to participate in certain, restricted actions until the professional (supervisor) computer approves of releasing the "bad" computer back to the general system. The supervisor computer may actually be controlled by a human who is trying to resolve the issue on the offending computer.
* Another concept worth investigating is that of Foucault's "Panopticon" which is a prison in which everything can be seen. This can also be extended from the strictly prison sense to the level of daily interactions between people and the idea of shame. Most rules are followed because of the knowledge that those around you will see what you have done and their view of you will change, you will have a social stygma. If this is adopted by the computers, through some reputation mechanism, then maybe distributed computing relationships could be formed and altered based on the actions conducted by individual computers.

===Ecce Homo & The Anarchist===
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo & The Anarchist translated by Thomas Wayne, New York, 2004. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xx6IfcqRvbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=ecce+homo&ots=44YGJlQ3Hb&sig=nzwX1IBP-Qj-TOnlmBOqGWUk810#v=onepage&q&f=false PDF] (preview copy)
* If we were going to add shame/stygma to computers, there would need to be some mechanism to manage what is good and what is bad. Nietzsche's work could provide a basis for this computer moral code as he describes two different forms of morality based on two different social position: "master-morality" and "slave-morality".
** Master-morality is split based on good vs. bad, for example, good would be things like wealth, strength, health, and power, while bad is associated terms like poor, weak, sick, and pathetic.
** Slave-morality is split on good vs. evil, for example, good would be terms like charity, piety, restraint, meekness, submission, while evil terms are worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive.
* Although some of these terms make no sense in the realm of computers, others certainly could work as a basis for computer morality. For example, if there were measure of strength, health, wealth based on network and data concepts like bandwidth, latency, data integrity, etc. than certain computers could be more "good" than others. Similarly, if computers were acting selfishly, cruelly or aggressively (say DoS or spam) then those computers would be considered as morally "bad". Based on these moral evaluations, computers could have relationships created or destroyed. Moreover, relationship parameters could be given to computers so that if you don't care how something gets accomplished (whether it is morally good or not) then you could tell your computer to allow less moral interactions to occur.
*If this morality was tied to the reputation component, then all computers would be able to know how other computers "socially" behave. This would further allow punishment methods, as described in the above Foucault section, to be handed out based on how "bad" a computer is and the affending computer can only be released when it's morality is deemed appropriate by the supervising (professional) computer.

===Proof-of-Work===
There has been a lot of research done in the area of computational puzzles to fight spam. The idea is that there is currently very little cost associated with sending spam (much less than .01c per email), so we want to make it a bit more "expensive" for spammers to achieve their goal. One solution is to have any email-sending computer perform some type of computational puzzle every time an email is sent. The result of the computation is appended to the email and can be verified by the recipient. One example is to find a string that when hashed gives a result smaller or larger than a specific value. You can statistically predict how long such a computation would take, and you could tweak it to be some particular value (10s, 1m, etc).

I see this as being related to justice, because each self-governing entity can set up these proof-of-work requirements and adjust the difficulty for "trusted" entities and "untrusted" ones. The difficulty can also be increased for entities that misbehave, resulting in a kind of punishment. These punished systems would have to do more computation (e.g., 10m, 1hr) before they're allowed to communicate with someone else.

I have some ideas on how you could technically do this, which we can discuss in class. And now some links:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-sip-hashcash-06#page-6]
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/spam-com.aspx]

===Gathering Evidence===

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4489680&tag=1

Above is a paper that proposes using statistical data to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic during a DDoS attack. While the paper proposes the statistics to be used for blocking bad traffic, the same logic can be applied to gathering evidence against the attackers of a DDoS. It gets pretty heavy into the statistical analysis, so it'd probably be better to read the paper than me attempting to explain it.
Basically, it's meant to detect a DDoS that is purposefully disguised as a traffic flood. This means that Justice can be properly served to malicious computers as opposed to too many computers wanting your resources.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01219052

Above is a paper that discusses the idea of computer forensics, and what is needed in order to gather and manage evidence. Although it is meant to be applied to a human level of judgement, computers may be capable of processing this evidence effectively. Logs maintained by routers and local devices may be used as evidence, provided that there be a way to encrypt the data in a way that preserves the original form. It also discusses the challenge of presenting computer related evidence to non-technical jurors, but this is not a concern for computer level management. All that is required for computer forensics to work is additional software being run on select computers to process and preserve any evidence gathered.

===CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act===

In terms of justice, there has been an act that has specifications to what cyber crimes and of what caliber they should be categorized in. One fundamental idea that is followed is the mens rea, which is defined as the "mental state" of a crime. "The Model Penal Code ("MPC") lists four levels of mens rea -- purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently. The MPC categories range from the highest level, purposely, to the lowest level, negligently. These mens rea levels are further divided into high and low mens rea requirements. The high mens rea levels include acts criminals do intentionally and knowingly. The low mens rea levels include acts criminals do recklessly, negligently, and with strict liability. Criminals have a higher level of mens rea when their intent is more specific; therefore, they are more blameworthy. With these differing mens rea categories in mind, Congress drafted CFAA to address computer crimes occurring on the Internet."[http://www.lawtechjournal.com/archives/blt/i3-hh.html]

DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-11T18:52:33Z

Mchou2: /* Justice Involving Computers */

DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-11T18:51:41Z

Mchou2: /* Justice Involving Computers */

DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-11T18:51:22Z

Mchou2: /* Justice Involving Computers */

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-03T03:32:08Z

Mchou2: /* Discussion */

==Discussion==
Put any notes or links you might have that you are currently reading or might want to read later so others can read them too!

=Matthew=
I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.2723&rep=rep1&type=pdf Responsible Computers?]

=Mike=

=Thomas=

Talk:DistOS-2011W Justice

2011-03-03T03:29:58Z

Mchou2: Created page with "=Discussion= Put any notes or links you might have that you are currently reading or might want to read later so others can read them too! I am currently reading a part of thi…"

=Discussion=
Put any notes or links you might have that you are currently reading or might want to read later so others can read them too!

I am currently reading a part of this book for some details on virtual punishment and a bit of history that this guy wrote about, but not sure if there is much there yet. [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KacfpI0zYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA206&dq=punishing+computers&ots=YhI8lfMo1F&sig=c7MqOVjR-9QKjj5_ANi0yyxYiAA#v=onepage&q=punishing%20computers&f=false link] --[[User:Mchou2|Mchou2]] 03:29, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

DistOS-2011W Globus

2011-03-01T23:50:31Z

Mchou2: /* References */

Matthew Chou

=Introduction=
The system that I have attempted to implement was the [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/ Globus Toolkit(1)], and from my current knowledge and understanding it seems quite difficult to create software that can be used on a grid system. While searching for different distributed systems I have come across different systems that are utilized for various fields of research, such as [http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ BOINC(2)], [http://folding.stanford.edu/ folding@home(3)], and many other @home projects as well as [http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ Condor(4)].(list can be found [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects here(5)]) Seeing as there are many of these types of systems being used around the world, I thought it would interesting to see what steps it would take to implement such a system and to see if I could get something to run on them.

'''Background'''

The basis of grid computing has been around for quite some time, starting with super computers which have many processors and vasts amounts of memory working under one machine. The idea behind a supercomputer, allowing the power of many machines to be run under one machine gives that one "single" machine a large threshold of computational power, and that itself is the idea that is to be implemented in grid computing. Multiple machines across various geographic distances working together to give power to any one machine that requires it. The thought of such a system seems like an obvious task to do, but with such a system it gives rise to different implementation issues that current operating systems have to deal with, such as heterogeneity, scalability, and adaptability[http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false (6)]. Heterogeneity refers to having standards of use and data that the grid can follow so that when other domains are part of the grid there is no problems with integration and usage of the grid. Scalability is necessary for when the grid size increases because of the scalability of application usage on the grid and the organization/management of jobs distributed across it. Adaptability is also necessary because at any given point a node on the grid may go down and the job it had been doing must be done by another node, so with increased scalability the grid can utilize multiple nodes to adapt to dropped nodes as well as malicious nodes who might attempt to do incorrect jobs. The job of the Globus Toolkit is being the middleware, which provides the services that allow for grid computing to work successfully. Other known middleware implementations are [http://glite.cern.ch/ glite(7)], and [http://www.unicore.eu/ UNICORE(8)].

The following paper will go over the steps that I took to install the Globus Toolkit;including details of the certification process from SimpleCA, implementing a "Hello, world" application on it, and discussion of my thoughts on the ease of installation but hard implementation of applications on a grid computing system.

=Installation=
==Environment Setup ==
On my journey to installing the Globus Toolkit, I have decided upon installing the latest version available which is the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3. [[File:Screenshot1.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|Pre-requisite check]]This grid implementation must be installed on a UNIX based OS which I chose to be Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine operated under [http://www.virtualbox.org/ Oracle VM VirtualBox(9)]. The installation instructions I followed had a [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/ quickstart(10) installation tutorial] and an [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/ Admin Guide tutorial(11)] which I both read because some of the instructions were more simply explained in the quickstart tutorial than the Admin Guide. If I were to suggest how to set up one's environment, I would recommend following the Admin Guide and using the quickstart as a reference. The quickstart guide gives a list of required software that can be checked with a few simple commands in the terminal that check the versions/existence of '''openssl''', '''libssl''', '''zlib''', '''gcc''', '''g++''', '''tar''', '''sed''', and''' make'''. There are specific instructions on each type of platform before installing the toolkit so make sure to check and see if you have any additional steps or compatibility issues that you should be aware of. There are some additional packages that need to be installed for implementing the hello world application, as well as some optional software such as a relational database, for this I installed PostgreSQL and psqlODBC which is the driver for PostgreSQL. Setting up the environment was easy enough to do for me to say that anyone should be able to follow the tutorial up to this point.

==Globus Toolkit Installation==
Before installing the toolkit itself, its good to understand the model that the Globus Toolkit is to follow. There will be a host, node A, which has a client, node B, as well as a Certificate Authority, node C (certificates explained in the next section). The host has clients who connect and can ask for jobs to be completed which is managed by the host, almost like a thread scheduler in an operating system, it manages the jobs that are given. The difference would be that the host has to also manage the resources being shared and it provides services such as control over Computing / Processing Power (GRAM), Data Management (GridFTP, DAI, RLS), Monitoring/Discovery (MDS), and Authorization/Security (CAS). The grid system is supposed to be used upon multiple machines, but for the sake of testing/simulation, it can be simply implemented upon a single computer, and then later branched out to other nodes if you wanted.

There are a couple of reoccurring steps that are necessary for the installation steps given to work. The first one being the creation of a non-privileged user named "'''globus'''", who is to perform the administrative tasks and deploy services, so the "globus" user would be the host node. I then made a directory to where I was going to install the toolkit and gave read/write permissions to the "globus" user on that folder. The next thing I had to do was sign in as the globus user and set the GLOBUS_LOCATION variable to the directory I had made by using the
globus@globus:export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/usr/local/globus-5.0.3
command in the terminal. The directory should contain the contents of the Globus Toolkit installation tar which can be downloaded from [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/ here]. The GLOBUS_LOCATION variable should be always set since the tutorial asks for its use very often.
Then I ran
globus@globus:./configure --prefix=$GLOBUS_LOCATION
globus@globus:make
and it took approximately 30 minutes on my computer, then I ran
globus@globus:make install
If you have followed all of the steps before hand correctly, there shouldn't be any errors occurring, if there is then it most likely will be some error of the genre of "missing library" or something that can be easily installed. At the end of the installation I found myself relieved of the completed installation and thought to myself that this was not so hard to install, so at this point it seems that using the Toolkit is not so difficult after all.

== Certification ==
The certification process is used in a Globus grid because of the security/authentication that is necessary for a scalable system to operate. If any random node in the world wanted to participate in the grid and use[[File:Screenshot2.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|SimpleCA setup]][[File:Screenshot5.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|User Certificate Request]]
it or even abuse it without being accountable, it would not only cause possible harm to the work that is trying to be done on the grid, but also it will require the grid to be closely managed for these random inconsistencies in service and bad data. The system itself already tries to maintain the purity of nodes by doing multiple instances of the same operations over many nodes to have consistent results, as well as marking the nodes that may be malicious would be a nightmare if there was no certification process being implemented. The certification process allows for the host to know that a user is indeed a trusted user and that some organization is held responsible for vouching for this user. In real world implementations the Certified Authority(CA) (the one who signs the certificate) would normally be of some trusted organization such as how [https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page/?sl=t72320166440000002&gclid=CJH6qpyNoKcCFac65QodPjU4cA VeriSign(12)] operates, but in the case of my testings I will simply allow for the globus user to be the CA. I used the tool that the toolkit supports called [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/#gtadmin-simpleca SimpleCA(13)] which provides a wrapper around the OpenSSL CA functionality and is sufficient for simple Grid services.

'''SimpleCA'''
The SimpleCA allows a user to become the CA for a grid and permits the CA to sign certificates that it has been issued for the grid host. Following the SimpleCA was easy since it provided a script that can be run that will ask for certain fields to be completed. An important thing to note was the email you set your CA to, because anytime a new user wanted to be part of that grid, it would need to email a certificate to the CA email so that it can be signed and returned. The next thing to note was the expiration date of the CA certificate, since after some point it is good practice for the CA to have to renew its certification. The default is set to 5 years(1825 days), so I left it as default. The most important thing to memorize is the CA PEM because this password is used for the CA to sign each certificate that they are given, a CA without the password is a useless CA and would require re-certification, which mean running the script again. One issue that I came across which was not mentioned in the tutorial was the installation of globus-gsi-cert-utils-progs package which is necessary for the signing process. After creating a CA profile it is necessary as they have noted, to execute the command
$GLOBUS_LOCATION/setup/globus_simple_ca_CA_Hash_setup/setup-gsi -default
which completes the CA setup process. What is the point of a CA without a host/client relationship to sign certificates for, so therefore creating a host certificate is the next step i took.

On my host node(root account) I requested a certificate by calling
grid-cert-request -host 'hostname'
This created 3 files:
*/etc/grid-security/hostkey.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert.pem (which is empty)

One of the complications of creating a grid is the organization and consideration of which account/node is responsible for which service. I imagine if you were to implement this system as a team it would be a lot more simple and easier to manage. The empty hostcert.pem file is empty because it has yet to be signed by the CA. Hopping onto the CA(globus) I use the
grid-ca-sign -in /etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem -out hostsigned.pem
command and the CA password to verify the CA identity to create a signed certificate. This hostsigned.pem should then be copied over into the ''' /etc/grid-security/''' directory and be renamed as '''hostcert.pem''' to replace the empty one. After the host has been signed, users may now request certificates with the '''grid-cert-request''' command, but will have to email the certificate manually to the CA so that the CA can sign it just as it did for the host, then return the signed.pem file so that it can be renamed usercert.pem so that it replaces the empty one that was made during the certification request. There are further instructions in the tutorial about how to configure the certification upon multiple machines by copying over a package generated by the SimpleCA service, but I did not use multiple machines so I will not go into that detail, but by reading over it quickly, it doesn't seem that it would be too difficult to implement.

= Evaluation of Installation =
After installing the toolkit and setting up the certification process brings the tutorial to a point where the additional information is for extra services and options that include firewall security, data management, execution management, and usage statistics. Setting up the environment was not hard but tedious, as for the installation of the toolkit itself was not hard but it took the most time because of the unpacking and creation of files. Setting up the SimpleCA was a little more tricky because of the constant switching of accounts, but once again, it would probably easier to manage had I been working with a group to implement this system. I flipped through the rest of the tutorial on installing the toolkit and saw that utilizing the other services such as a firewall, GridFTP, and GRAM5(used to measure usage) would take a lot more time and perhaps a little more knownledge of networking and capturing services to fully understand and use. There is definitely some areas in the installation tutorial which could be reworded, such as in the section '''5.1 Set environment variables'''. They stated:
<pre>
Set environment variables
In order for the system to know the location of the Globus Toolkit commands you just installed, you must set an environment variable and source the globus-user-env.sh script.

1. As globus, set GLOBUS_LOCATION to where you installed the Globus Toolkit. This will be one of the following:

Using Bourne shells:

globus$ export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/path/to/install
Using csh:

globus$ setenv GLOBUS_LOCATION /path/to/install

2. Source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.{sh,csh} depending on your shell.

Use .sh for Bourne shell:

globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
Use .csh for C shell.

globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.csh
</pre>
The first instruction is crystal clear as to what to type, where as the second instruction seems to fall short of telling you to write "source" when using a Bourne shell, which was an issue I had when setting these variables. So they should change '''globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' to '''globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' and the instruction at 2 to be in a similar style that was used in instruction 1.

= Hello World Implementation =
There was only a few different tutorials I could find that taught you how to implement a program onto the grid you have created. There was one tutorial that implemented an application that has a video file be edited(by some process) on each node in the grid and they return their edited pieces so that it can be remade into a complete edited video(from the [http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/ Globus Consortium(14)]. That tutorial seemed quite complicated for me and would require more time to implement. Another tutorial that was available was linked from the Globus Toolkit homepage which explains in large detail of how web services are an integral part to the grid network and the infrastructure of the Globus Toolkit ([http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html Globus Tutorial(15)]). This was too extensive of a tutorial considering it was 191 pages in length, so I opted to try and implement a simple [http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf java based hello world(16)] example I found. This tutorial required the usage of Java, Ant, JUnit, Postgresql and JDBC(java API for sql) to be installed, all of which can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu. After this additional installation, I started the Postgresql server and activated the grid container which enables for jobs to be done on the grid.(the postgresql server was started in the root account, and the globus container started in the globus account)
[[Image:Comp_4000.png|thumb|center|upright=5.0|alt=|Diagram of file structure used in tutorial. (self drawn)(16)]]
By following the tutorial I created the files :

*build.properties
*build.xml
*interface-source/hello/HelloWorld.java
*server-source/hello/HelloWorldImpl.java
*wsdd-source/server-deploy.wsdd
*client-source/helloc/HelloWorldClient.java
from copying and pasting code in from the appendix and put them into the directory '''/home/mateh/dev/HelloProject/'''. Since the tutorial had me build a script, I can use the script to generate the files I need by simply calling '''ant step1''' and '''ant step2''' (which generates a gar file, which is a Grid Archive file similar in idea to a jar). The gar file that was created on the user mateh must then be copied onto the globus account for it to be deployed. After copying the file into the globus toolkit installation directory, using the command
ant deploy -Dgar.name=/usr/local/globus/gars/hellogrid.gar
I deployed the gar file. It is important to reset the grid container at this point to ensure the new grid service will be deployed. Now that the server implementation has been completed, I can hop back onto the user account mateh and build the client file using '''ant step3''' and then running '''ant run.client'''.

= Implementation Overview =
Implementing the Hello World webservice was easy based on the fact that it required only a few extra installations of packages, and the code was already given and was merely needed to be copied and pasted. This tutorial was far more easier to follow than the previous ones that I have seen, and I would recommend it to people who want to try out a grid computing system. The issue behind implementing these services would seem to me as difficult by first coming up with a job that can be split into multiple jobs and not have the worry of time sensitive deadlines, and once the job has been decided upon, to what amount can it be divided into? This Hello World example simply outputted text on different nodes, hardly a suitable challenge for a grid computing system, but to have to come up with a task that must delegate the amount of divisions of work must take lots of planning. Once this planning has been done, further work must be done into coming up with different ways the grid system will handle invalid data so as to not hinder the operation of that job. Therefore I believe that implementing the Hello World Tutorial was simple based on the given code and explanation, but in a real world situation I think that trying to come up with an application that is grid based as well making sure that it works properly with the grid would be a different matter completely.

=Conclusion=
After setting up my environment, installing the toolkit, and implementing the Hello World tutorial, I can say that the setup and installation of the Globus Toolkit was relatively smooth, and the implementation of an application onto the grid would have been a nightmare had I not found the tutorial that I did. Even though I did say that the tutorial was easy, it does change my mind about how it would be difficult to implement an application on the grid because the Hello World example does not seem like a fair judgment to how complicated the applications that exist on the grid of today. The one thing that I have learned from the following the Globus Toolkit tutorials on the Globus Alliance web page would be that they have very specific instructions at time, and very vague ones as well. The challenge to getting resources on how to implement a grid computing system also depends vastly on the version you are attempting to install. I have found many different tutorials, such as the ones i mentioned, who are made for earlier versions of the Globus Toolkit, some of which that do not have features that the future ones hold. This causes much confusion for as to what different commands are called and what services may or may not be available. I have looked into other grid computing systems and have also found an alternative method to testing a grid system. The [http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/ Virtual Data Kit(17)] apparently contains a wide variety of distributed computing software that can be easily used, so it seems to be a worthy solution to follow, as well as the implementation of already built services on the grid such as Condor might be something to look into how it is done. Therefore, from my experimentation of the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3, I have concluded that it is simple enough to install the basic services and setup a Certification Authority, but remains difficult to create/implement your own services onto the grid without further knowledge of grid computing and networks in general.

=References=

*(1) Globus Toolkit Homepage: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/
*(2) BOINC Homepage: University of California, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
*(3) Folding@home Homepage: Vijay Pande and Stanford University, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://folding.stanford.edu/
*(4) Condor Homepage: Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/
*(5) List of distributed computing projects: Wikipedia, Accessed: Feb 8,2011 [electronic source] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
*(6) Grid computing: making the global infrastructure a reality: Fran Berman, Geoffrey Fox, Anthony J. G. Hey,Published: John Wiley and Sons, 2003 , Accessed: Feb 19,2011 [electronic source link] [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false]
*(7) gLite Homepage: gLite, Accessed:Feb 5,2011 [electronic source] http://glite.cern.ch/
*(8) UNICORE Homepage: Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Accessed:Feb 5,2011 [electronic source] http://www.unicore.eu/
*(9) VirtualBox Homepage: ORACLE, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.virtualbox.org/
*(10) GT 5.0 Quickstart: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 10,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/
*(11) Installing GT 5.0.3: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 10,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/
*(12) VeriSign Authentication services: Symantec Corporation, Accessed: Feb 15,2011 [electronic source] https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page/?sl=t72320166440000002&gclid=CJH6qpyNoKcCFac65QodPjU4cA
*(13) Appendix C.Installing SimpleCA: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 16,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/#gtadmin-simpleca
*(14) Globus Toolkit Tutorial: Globus Consortium, Accessed: Feb 20,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/
*(15) The Globus Toolkit 4 Programmer's Tutorial: Borja Sotomayor, Accessed: Feb 21,2011 [electronic source] http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html
*(16) HOW TO INSTALL GLOBUS AND WRITE A HELLO WORLD SERVICE: Drs. Wico Mulder Ing. A.M. Kuipers, November 2004, Version 0.22 [electronic source] http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf
*(17) Virtual Data Toolkit: Open Science Grid (OSG), Accessed: Feb 23,2011 [electronic source] http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/

Reference relations:

Installation: (1),(9),(10),(11),(13).

Implementation tutorials: (14)Video filtering program, (15)Webservice, (16)Helloworld.

Information:(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(12),(17).

DistOS-2011W Globus

2011-03-01T23:50:15Z

Mchou2: /* References */

Matthew Chou

=Introduction=
The system that I have attempted to implement was the [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/ Globus Toolkit(1)], and from my current knowledge and understanding it seems quite difficult to create software that can be used on a grid system. While searching for different distributed systems I have come across different systems that are utilized for various fields of research, such as [http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ BOINC(2)], [http://folding.stanford.edu/ folding@home(3)], and many other @home projects as well as [http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ Condor(4)].(list can be found [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects here(5)]) Seeing as there are many of these types of systems being used around the world, I thought it would interesting to see what steps it would take to implement such a system and to see if I could get something to run on them.

'''Background'''

The basis of grid computing has been around for quite some time, starting with super computers which have many processors and vasts amounts of memory working under one machine. The idea behind a supercomputer, allowing the power of many machines to be run under one machine gives that one "single" machine a large threshold of computational power, and that itself is the idea that is to be implemented in grid computing. Multiple machines across various geographic distances working together to give power to any one machine that requires it. The thought of such a system seems like an obvious task to do, but with such a system it gives rise to different implementation issues that current operating systems have to deal with, such as heterogeneity, scalability, and adaptability[http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false (6)]. Heterogeneity refers to having standards of use and data that the grid can follow so that when other domains are part of the grid there is no problems with integration and usage of the grid. Scalability is necessary for when the grid size increases because of the scalability of application usage on the grid and the organization/management of jobs distributed across it. Adaptability is also necessary because at any given point a node on the grid may go down and the job it had been doing must be done by another node, so with increased scalability the grid can utilize multiple nodes to adapt to dropped nodes as well as malicious nodes who might attempt to do incorrect jobs. The job of the Globus Toolkit is being the middleware, which provides the services that allow for grid computing to work successfully. Other known middleware implementations are [http://glite.cern.ch/ glite(7)], and [http://www.unicore.eu/ UNICORE(8)].

The following paper will go over the steps that I took to install the Globus Toolkit;including details of the certification process from SimpleCA, implementing a "Hello, world" application on it, and discussion of my thoughts on the ease of installation but hard implementation of applications on a grid computing system.

=Installation=
==Environment Setup ==
On my journey to installing the Globus Toolkit, I have decided upon installing the latest version available which is the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3. [[File:Screenshot1.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|Pre-requisite check]]This grid implementation must be installed on a UNIX based OS which I chose to be Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine operated under [http://www.virtualbox.org/ Oracle VM VirtualBox(9)]. The installation instructions I followed had a [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/ quickstart(10) installation tutorial] and an [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/ Admin Guide tutorial(11)] which I both read because some of the instructions were more simply explained in the quickstart tutorial than the Admin Guide. If I were to suggest how to set up one's environment, I would recommend following the Admin Guide and using the quickstart as a reference. The quickstart guide gives a list of required software that can be checked with a few simple commands in the terminal that check the versions/existence of '''openssl''', '''libssl''', '''zlib''', '''gcc''', '''g++''', '''tar''', '''sed''', and''' make'''. There are specific instructions on each type of platform before installing the toolkit so make sure to check and see if you have any additional steps or compatibility issues that you should be aware of. There are some additional packages that need to be installed for implementing the hello world application, as well as some optional software such as a relational database, for this I installed PostgreSQL and psqlODBC which is the driver for PostgreSQL. Setting up the environment was easy enough to do for me to say that anyone should be able to follow the tutorial up to this point.

==Globus Toolkit Installation==
Before installing the toolkit itself, its good to understand the model that the Globus Toolkit is to follow. There will be a host, node A, which has a client, node B, as well as a Certificate Authority, node C (certificates explained in the next section). The host has clients who connect and can ask for jobs to be completed which is managed by the host, almost like a thread scheduler in an operating system, it manages the jobs that are given. The difference would be that the host has to also manage the resources being shared and it provides services such as control over Computing / Processing Power (GRAM), Data Management (GridFTP, DAI, RLS), Monitoring/Discovery (MDS), and Authorization/Security (CAS). The grid system is supposed to be used upon multiple machines, but for the sake of testing/simulation, it can be simply implemented upon a single computer, and then later branched out to other nodes if you wanted.

There are a couple of reoccurring steps that are necessary for the installation steps given to work. The first one being the creation of a non-privileged user named "'''globus'''", who is to perform the administrative tasks and deploy services, so the "globus" user would be the host node. I then made a directory to where I was going to install the toolkit and gave read/write permissions to the "globus" user on that folder. The next thing I had to do was sign in as the globus user and set the GLOBUS_LOCATION variable to the directory I had made by using the
globus@globus:export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/usr/local/globus-5.0.3
command in the terminal. The directory should contain the contents of the Globus Toolkit installation tar which can be downloaded from [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/ here]. The GLOBUS_LOCATION variable should be always set since the tutorial asks for its use very often.
Then I ran
globus@globus:./configure --prefix=$GLOBUS_LOCATION
globus@globus:make
and it took approximately 30 minutes on my computer, then I ran
globus@globus:make install
If you have followed all of the steps before hand correctly, there shouldn't be any errors occurring, if there is then it most likely will be some error of the genre of "missing library" or something that can be easily installed. At the end of the installation I found myself relieved of the completed installation and thought to myself that this was not so hard to install, so at this point it seems that using the Toolkit is not so difficult after all.

== Certification ==
The certification process is used in a Globus grid because of the security/authentication that is necessary for a scalable system to operate. If any random node in the world wanted to participate in the grid and use[[File:Screenshot2.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|SimpleCA setup]][[File:Screenshot5.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|User Certificate Request]]
it or even abuse it without being accountable, it would not only cause possible harm to the work that is trying to be done on the grid, but also it will require the grid to be closely managed for these random inconsistencies in service and bad data. The system itself already tries to maintain the purity of nodes by doing multiple instances of the same operations over many nodes to have consistent results, as well as marking the nodes that may be malicious would be a nightmare if there was no certification process being implemented. The certification process allows for the host to know that a user is indeed a trusted user and that some organization is held responsible for vouching for this user. In real world implementations the Certified Authority(CA) (the one who signs the certificate) would normally be of some trusted organization such as how [https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page/?sl=t72320166440000002&gclid=CJH6qpyNoKcCFac65QodPjU4cA VeriSign(12)] operates, but in the case of my testings I will simply allow for the globus user to be the CA. I used the tool that the toolkit supports called [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/#gtadmin-simpleca SimpleCA(13)] which provides a wrapper around the OpenSSL CA functionality and is sufficient for simple Grid services.

'''SimpleCA'''
The SimpleCA allows a user to become the CA for a grid and permits the CA to sign certificates that it has been issued for the grid host. Following the SimpleCA was easy since it provided a script that can be run that will ask for certain fields to be completed. An important thing to note was the email you set your CA to, because anytime a new user wanted to be part of that grid, it would need to email a certificate to the CA email so that it can be signed and returned. The next thing to note was the expiration date of the CA certificate, since after some point it is good practice for the CA to have to renew its certification. The default is set to 5 years(1825 days), so I left it as default. The most important thing to memorize is the CA PEM because this password is used for the CA to sign each certificate that they are given, a CA without the password is a useless CA and would require re-certification, which mean running the script again. One issue that I came across which was not mentioned in the tutorial was the installation of globus-gsi-cert-utils-progs package which is necessary for the signing process. After creating a CA profile it is necessary as they have noted, to execute the command
$GLOBUS_LOCATION/setup/globus_simple_ca_CA_Hash_setup/setup-gsi -default
which completes the CA setup process. What is the point of a CA without a host/client relationship to sign certificates for, so therefore creating a host certificate is the next step i took.

On my host node(root account) I requested a certificate by calling
grid-cert-request -host 'hostname'
This created 3 files:
*/etc/grid-security/hostkey.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert.pem (which is empty)

One of the complications of creating a grid is the organization and consideration of which account/node is responsible for which service. I imagine if you were to implement this system as a team it would be a lot more simple and easier to manage. The empty hostcert.pem file is empty because it has yet to be signed by the CA. Hopping onto the CA(globus) I use the
grid-ca-sign -in /etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem -out hostsigned.pem
command and the CA password to verify the CA identity to create a signed certificate. This hostsigned.pem should then be copied over into the ''' /etc/grid-security/''' directory and be renamed as '''hostcert.pem''' to replace the empty one. After the host has been signed, users may now request certificates with the '''grid-cert-request''' command, but will have to email the certificate manually to the CA so that the CA can sign it just as it did for the host, then return the signed.pem file so that it can be renamed usercert.pem so that it replaces the empty one that was made during the certification request. There are further instructions in the tutorial about how to configure the certification upon multiple machines by copying over a package generated by the SimpleCA service, but I did not use multiple machines so I will not go into that detail, but by reading over it quickly, it doesn't seem that it would be too difficult to implement.

= Evaluation of Installation =
After installing the toolkit and setting up the certification process brings the tutorial to a point where the additional information is for extra services and options that include firewall security, data management, execution management, and usage statistics. Setting up the environment was not hard but tedious, as for the installation of the toolkit itself was not hard but it took the most time because of the unpacking and creation of files. Setting up the SimpleCA was a little more tricky because of the constant switching of accounts, but once again, it would probably easier to manage had I been working with a group to implement this system. I flipped through the rest of the tutorial on installing the toolkit and saw that utilizing the other services such as a firewall, GridFTP, and GRAM5(used to measure usage) would take a lot more time and perhaps a little more knownledge of networking and capturing services to fully understand and use. There is definitely some areas in the installation tutorial which could be reworded, such as in the section '''5.1 Set environment variables'''. They stated:
<pre>
Set environment variables
In order for the system to know the location of the Globus Toolkit commands you just installed, you must set an environment variable and source the globus-user-env.sh script.

1. As globus, set GLOBUS_LOCATION to where you installed the Globus Toolkit. This will be one of the following:

Using Bourne shells:

globus$ export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/path/to/install
Using csh:

globus$ setenv GLOBUS_LOCATION /path/to/install

2. Source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.{sh,csh} depending on your shell.

Use .sh for Bourne shell:

globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
Use .csh for C shell.

globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.csh
</pre>
The first instruction is crystal clear as to what to type, where as the second instruction seems to fall short of telling you to write "source" when using a Bourne shell, which was an issue I had when setting these variables. So they should change '''globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' to '''globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' and the instruction at 2 to be in a similar style that was used in instruction 1.

= Hello World Implementation =
There was only a few different tutorials I could find that taught you how to implement a program onto the grid you have created. There was one tutorial that implemented an application that has a video file be edited(by some process) on each node in the grid and they return their edited pieces so that it can be remade into a complete edited video(from the [http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/ Globus Consortium(14)]. That tutorial seemed quite complicated for me and would require more time to implement. Another tutorial that was available was linked from the Globus Toolkit homepage which explains in large detail of how web services are an integral part to the grid network and the infrastructure of the Globus Toolkit ([http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html Globus Tutorial(15)]). This was too extensive of a tutorial considering it was 191 pages in length, so I opted to try and implement a simple [http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf java based hello world(16)] example I found. This tutorial required the usage of Java, Ant, JUnit, Postgresql and JDBC(java API for sql) to be installed, all of which can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu. After this additional installation, I started the Postgresql server and activated the grid container which enables for jobs to be done on the grid.(the postgresql server was started in the root account, and the globus container started in the globus account)
[[Image:Comp_4000.png|thumb|center|upright=5.0|alt=|Diagram of file structure used in tutorial. (self drawn)(16)]]
By following the tutorial I created the files :

*build.properties
*build.xml
*interface-source/hello/HelloWorld.java
*server-source/hello/HelloWorldImpl.java
*wsdd-source/server-deploy.wsdd
*client-source/helloc/HelloWorldClient.java
from copying and pasting code in from the appendix and put them into the directory '''/home/mateh/dev/HelloProject/'''. Since the tutorial had me build a script, I can use the script to generate the files I need by simply calling '''ant step1''' and '''ant step2''' (which generates a gar file, which is a Grid Archive file similar in idea to a jar). The gar file that was created on the user mateh must then be copied onto the globus account for it to be deployed. After copying the file into the globus toolkit installation directory, using the command
ant deploy -Dgar.name=/usr/local/globus/gars/hellogrid.gar
I deployed the gar file. It is important to reset the grid container at this point to ensure the new grid service will be deployed. Now that the server implementation has been completed, I can hop back onto the user account mateh and build the client file using '''ant step3''' and then running '''ant run.client'''.

= Implementation Overview =
Implementing the Hello World webservice was easy based on the fact that it required only a few extra installations of packages, and the code was already given and was merely needed to be copied and pasted. This tutorial was far more easier to follow than the previous ones that I have seen, and I would recommend it to people who want to try out a grid computing system. The issue behind implementing these services would seem to me as difficult by first coming up with a job that can be split into multiple jobs and not have the worry of time sensitive deadlines, and once the job has been decided upon, to what amount can it be divided into? This Hello World example simply outputted text on different nodes, hardly a suitable challenge for a grid computing system, but to have to come up with a task that must delegate the amount of divisions of work must take lots of planning. Once this planning has been done, further work must be done into coming up with different ways the grid system will handle invalid data so as to not hinder the operation of that job. Therefore I believe that implementing the Hello World Tutorial was simple based on the given code and explanation, but in a real world situation I think that trying to come up with an application that is grid based as well making sure that it works properly with the grid would be a different matter completely.

=Conclusion=
After setting up my environment, installing the toolkit, and implementing the Hello World tutorial, I can say that the setup and installation of the Globus Toolkit was relatively smooth, and the implementation of an application onto the grid would have been a nightmare had I not found the tutorial that I did. Even though I did say that the tutorial was easy, it does change my mind about how it would be difficult to implement an application on the grid because the Hello World example does not seem like a fair judgment to how complicated the applications that exist on the grid of today. The one thing that I have learned from the following the Globus Toolkit tutorials on the Globus Alliance web page would be that they have very specific instructions at time, and very vague ones as well. The challenge to getting resources on how to implement a grid computing system also depends vastly on the version you are attempting to install. I have found many different tutorials, such as the ones i mentioned, who are made for earlier versions of the Globus Toolkit, some of which that do not have features that the future ones hold. This causes much confusion for as to what different commands are called and what services may or may not be available. I have looked into other grid computing systems and have also found an alternative method to testing a grid system. The [http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/ Virtual Data Kit(17)] apparently contains a wide variety of distributed computing software that can be easily used, so it seems to be a worthy solution to follow, as well as the implementation of already built services on the grid such as Condor might be something to look into how it is done. Therefore, from my experimentation of the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3, I have concluded that it is simple enough to install the basic services and setup a Certification Authority, but remains difficult to create/implement your own services onto the grid without further knowledge of grid computing and networks in general.

=References=

*(1) Globus Toolkit Homepage: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/
*(2) BOINC Homepage: University of California, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
*(3) Folding@home Homepage: Vijay Pande and Stanford University, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://folding.stanford.edu/
*(4) Condor Homepage: Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/
*(5) List of distributed computing projects: Wikipedia, Accessed: Feb 8,2011 [electronic source] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
*(6) Grid computing: making the global infrastructure a reality: Fran Berman, Geoffrey Fox, Anthony J. G. Hey,Published: John Wiley and Sons, 2003 , Accessed: Feb 19,2011 [electronic source link] [http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false]
*(7) gLite Homepage: gLite, Accessed:Feb 5,2011 [electronic source] http://glite.cern.ch/
*(8) UNICORE Homepage: Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Accessed:Feb 5,2011 [electronic source] http://www.unicore.eu/
*(9) VirtualBox Homepage: ORACLE, Accessed: Feb 3,2011 [electronic source] http://www.virtualbox.org/
*(10) GT 5.0 Quickstart: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 10,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/
*(11) Installing GT 5.0.3: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 10,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/
*(12) VeriSign Authentication services: Symantec Corporation, Accessed: Feb 15,2011 [electronic source] https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page/?sl=t72320166440000002&gclid=CJH6qpyNoKcCFac65QodPjU4cA
*(13) Appendix C.Installing SimpleCA: Globus Alliance, Accessed: Feb 16,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/#gtadmin-simpleca
*(14) Globus Toolkit Tutorial: Globus Consortium, Accessed: Feb 20,2011 [electronic source] http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/
*(15) The Globus Toolkit 4 Programmer's Tutorial: Borja Sotomayor, Accessed: Feb 21,2011 [electronic source] http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html
*(16) HOW TO INSTALL GLOBUS AND WRITE A HELLO WORLD SERVICE: Drs. Wico Mulder Ing. A.M. Kuipers, November 2004, Version 0.22 [electronic source] http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf
*(17) Virtual Data Toolkit: Open Science Grid (OSG), Accessed: Feb 23,2011 [electronic source] http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/

Reference relations:
Installation: (1),(9),(10),(11),(13).
Implementation tutorials: (14)Video filtering program, (15)Webservice, (16)Helloworld.
Information:(1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(12),(17).

2011-03-01T17:17:42Z

Mchou2:

DistOS-2011W Globus

2011-02-24T09:50:19Z

Mchou2: /* Hello World Implementation */

Matthew Chou
[[File:Toolkit logo 200 noname.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|Globus Toolkit]]
=Introduction=
The system that I have attempted to implement was the [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/ Globus Toolkit], and from my current knowledge and understanding it seems quite difficult to create software that can be used on a grid system. While searching for different distributed systems I have come across different systems that are utilized for various fields of research, such as [http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ BOINC], [http://folding.stanford.edu/ folding@home], and many other @home projects as well as [http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/ Condor].(list can be found [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects here]) Seeing as there are many of these types of systems being used around the world, I thought it would interesting to see what steps it would take to implement such a system and to see if I could get something to run on them.

'''Background'''

The basis of grid computing has been around for quite some time, starting with super computers which have many processors and vasts amounts of memory working under one machine. The idea behind a supercomputer, allowing the power of many machines to be run under one machine gives that one "single" machine a large threshold of computational power, and that itself is the idea that is to be implemented in grid computing. Multiple machines across various geographic distances working together to give power to any one machine that requires it. The thought of such a system seems like an obvious task to do, but with such a system it gives rise to different implementation issues that current operating systems have to deal with, such as heterogeneity, scalability, and adaptability[http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false]. Heterogeneity refers to having standards of use and data that the grid can follow so that when other domains are part of the grid there is no problems with integration and usage of the grid. Scalability is necessary for when the grid size increases because of the scalability of application usage on the grid and the organization/management of jobs distributed across it. Adaptability is also necessary because at any given point a node on the grid may go down and the job it had been doing must be done by another node, so with increased scalability the grid can utilize multiple nodes to adapt to dropped nodes as well as malicious nodes who might attempt to do incorrect jobs. The job of the Globus Toolkit is being the middleware, which provides the services that allow for grid computing to work successfully. Other known middleware implementations are [http://glite.cern.ch/ glite], and [http://www.unicore.eu/ UNICORE].

The following paper will go over the steps that I took to install the Globus Toolkit;including details of the certification process from SimpleCA, implementing a "Hello, world" application on it, and discussion of my thoughts on the ease of installation but hard implementation of applications on a grid computing system.

=Installation=
==Environment Setup ==
On my journey to installing the Globus Toolkit, I have decided upon installing the latest version available which is the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3. [[File:Screenshot1.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|Pre-requisite check]]This grid implementation must be installed on a UNIX based OS which I chose to be Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine operated under [http://www.virtualbox.org/ Oracle VM VirtualBox]. The installation instructions I followed had a [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/ quickstart installation tutorial] and an [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/ Admin Guide tutorial] which I both read because some of the instructions were more simply explained in the quickstart tutorial than the Admin Guide. If I were to suggest how to set up one's environment, I would recommend following the Admin Guide and using the quickstart as a reference. The quickstart guide gives a list of required software that can be checked with a few simple commands in the terminal that check the versions/existence of '''openssl''', '''libssl''', '''zlib''', '''gcc''', '''g++''', '''tar''', '''sed''', and''' make'''. There are specific instructions on each type of platform before installing the toolkit so make sure to check and see if you have any additional steps or compatibility issues that you should be aware of. There are some additional packages that need to be installed for implementing the hello world application, as well as some optional software such as a relational database, for this I installed PostgreSQL and psqlODBC which is the driver for PostgreSQL. Setting up the environment was easy enough to do for me to say that anyone should be able to follow the tutorial up to this point.

==Globus Toolkit Installation==
Before installing the toolkit itself, its good to understand the model that the Globus Toolkit is to follow. There will be a host, node A, which has a client, node B, as well as a Certificate Authority, node C (certificates explained in the next section). The host has clients who connect and can ask for jobs to be completed which is managed by the host, almost like a thread scheduler in an operating system, it manages the jobs that are given. The difference would be that the host has to also manage the resources being shared and it provides services such as control over Computing / Processing Power (GRAM), Data Management (GridFTP, DAI, RLS), Monitoring/Discovery (MDS), and Authorization/Security (CAS). The grid system is supposed to be used upon multiple machines, but for the sake of testing/simulation, it can be simply implemented upon a single computer, and then later branched out to other nodes if you wanted.

There are a couple of reoccuring steps that are necessary for the installation steps given to work. The first one being the creation of a non-privileged user named "'''globus'''", who is to perform the administrative tasks and deploy services, so the "globus" user would be the host node. I then made a directory to where I was going to install the toolkit and gave read/write permissions to the "globus" user on that folder. The next thing I had to do was sign in as the globus user and set the GLOBUS_LOCATION variable to the directory I had made by using the
globus@globus:export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/usr/local/globus-5.0.3
command in the terminal. The directory should contain the contents of the Globus Toolkit installation tar which can be downloaded from [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/ here]. The GLOBUS_LOCATION variable should be always set since the tutorial asks for its use very often.
Then I ran
globus@globus:./configure --prefix=$GLOBUS_LOCATION
globus@globus:make
and it took approximately 30 minutes on my computer, then I ran
globus@globus:make install
If you have followed all of the steps before hand correctly, there shouldn't be any errors occurring, if there is then it most likely will be some error of the genre of "missing library" or something that can be easily installed. At the end of the installation I found myself relieved of the completed installation and thought to myself that this was not so hard to install, so at this point it seems that using the Toolkit is not so difficult after all.

== Certification ==
The certification process is used in a Globus grid because of the security/authentication that is necessary for a scalable system to operate. If any random node in the world wanted to participate in the grid and use[[File:Screenshot2.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|SimpleCA setup]][[File:Screenshot5.png|thumb|alt=Example alt text|User Certificate Request]]
it or even abuse it without being accountable, it would not only cause possible harm to the work that is trying to be done on the grid, but also it will require the grid to be closely managed for these random inconsistencies in service and bad data. The system itself already tries to maintain the purity of nodes by doing multiple instances of the same operations over many nodes to have consistent results, as well as marking the nodes that may be malicious would be a nightmare if there was no certification process being implemented. The certification process allows for the host to know that a user is indeed a trusted user and that some organization is held responsible for vouching for this user. In real world implementations the Certified Authority(CA) (the one who signs the certificate) would normally be of some trusted organization such as how [https://www.verisign.com/ts-sem-page/?sl=t72320166440000002&gclid=CJH6qpyNoKcCFac65QodPjU4cA VeriSign] operates, but in the case of my testings I will simply allow for the globus user to be the CA. I used the tool that the toolkit supports called [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/install/#gtadmin-simpleca SimpleCA] which provides a wrapper around the OpenSSL CA functionality and is sufficient for simple Grid services.

'''SimpleCA'''
The SimpleCA allows a user to become the CA for a grid and permits the CA to sign certificates that it has been issued for the grid host. Following the SimpleCA was easy since it provided a script that can be run that will ask for certain fields to be completed. An important thing to note was the email you set your CA to, because anytime a new user wanted to be part of that grid, it would need to email a certificate to the CA email so that it can be signed and returned. The next thing to note was the expiration date of the CA certificate, since after some point it is good practice for the CA to have to renew its certification. The default is set to 5 years(1825 days), so I left it as default. The most important thing to memorize is the CA PEM because this password is used for the CA to sign each certificate that they are given, a CA without the password is a useless CA and would require re-certification, which mean running the script again. One issue that I came across which was not mentioned in the tutorial was the installation of globus-gsi-cert-utils-progs package which is necessary for the signing process. After creating a CA profile it is necessary as they have noted, to execute the command
$GLOBUS_LOCATION/setup/globus_simple_ca_CA_Hash_setup/setup-gsi -default
which completes the CA setup process. What is the point of a CA without a host/client relationship to sign certificates for, so therefore creating a host certificate is the next step i took.

On my host node(root account) I requested a certificate by calling
grid-cert-request -host 'hostname'
This created 3 files:
*/etc/grid-security/hostkey.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem
*/etc/grid-security/hostcert.pem (which is empty)

One of the complications of creating a grid is the organization and consideration of which account/node is responsible for which service. I imagine if you were to implement this system as a team it would be a lot more simple and easier to manage. The empty hostcert.pem file is empty because it has yet to be signed by the CA. Hopping onto the CA(globus) I use the
grid-ca-sign -in /etc/grid-security/hostcert_request.pem -out hostsigned.pem
command and the CA password to verify the CA identity to create a signed certificate. This hostsigned.pem should then be copied over into the ''' /etc/grid-security/''' directory and be renamed as '''hostcert.pem''' to replace the empty one. After the host has been signed, users may now request certificates with the '''grid-cert-request''' command, but will have to email the certificate manually to the CA so that the CA can sign it just as it did for the host, then return the signed.pem file so that it can be renamed usercert.pem so that it replaces the empty one that was made during the certification request. There are further instructions in the tutorial about how to configure the certification upon multiple machines by copying over a package generated by the SimpleCA service, but I did not use multiple machines so I will not go into that detail, but by reading over it quickly, it doesn't seem that it would be too difficult to implement.

= Evaluation of Installation =
After installing the toolkit and setting up the certification process brings the tutorial to a point where the additional information is for extra services and options that include firewall security, data management, execution management, and usage statistics. Setting up the environment was not hard but tedious, as for the installation of the toolkit itself was not hard but it took the most time because of the unpacking and creation of files. Setting up the SimpleCA was a little more tricky because of the constant switching of accounts, but once again, it would probably easier to manage had I been working with a group to implement this system. I flipped through the rest of the tutorial on installing the toolkit and saw that utilizing the other services such as a firewall, GridFTP, and GRAM5(used to measure usage) would take a lot more time and perhaps a little more knownledge of networking and capturing services to fully understand and use. There is definitely some areas in the installation tutorial which could be reworded, such as in the section '''5.1 Set environment variables'''. They stated:
<pre>
Set environment variables
In order for the system to know the location of the Globus Toolkit commands you just installed, you must set an environment variable and source the globus-user-env.sh script.

1. As globus, set GLOBUS_LOCATION to where you installed the Globus Toolkit. This will be one of the following:

Using Bourne shells:

globus$ export GLOBUS_LOCATION=/path/to/install
Using csh:

globus$ setenv GLOBUS_LOCATION /path/to/install

2. Source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.{sh,csh} depending on your shell.

Use .sh for Bourne shell:

globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh
Use .csh for C shell.

globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.csh
</pre>
The first instruction is crystal clear as to what to type, where as the second instruction seems to fall short of telling you to write "source" when using a Bourne shell, which was an issue I had when setting these variables. So they should change '''globus$ . $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' to '''globus$ source $GLOBUS_LOCATION/etc/globus-user-env.sh''' and the instruction at 2 to be in a similar style that was used in instruction 1.

= Hello World Implementation =
There was only a few different tutorials I could find that taught you how to implement a program onto the grid you have created. There was one tutorial that implemented an application that has a video file be edited(by some process) on each node in the grid and they return their edited pieces so that it can be remade into a complete edited video(from the [http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/ Globus Consortium]. That tutorial seemed quite complicated for me and would require more time to implement. Another tutorial that was available was linked from the Globus Toolkit homepage which explains in large detail of how web services are an integral part to the grid network and the infrastructure of the Globus Toolkit ([http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html Globus Tutorial]). This was too extensive of a tutorial considering it was 191 pages in length, so I opted to try and implement a simple [http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf java based hello world] example I found. This tutorial required the usage of Java, Ant, JUnit, Postgresql and JDBC(java API for sql) to be installed, all of which can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu. After this additional installation, I started the Postgresql server and activated the grid container which enables for jobs to be done on the grid.(the postgresql server was started in the root account, and the globus container started in the globus account)
[[Image:Webservicesetup.png|thumb|center|upright=5.0|alt=|Diagram of file structure used in tutorial]]
By following the tutorial I created the files :

*build.properties
*build.xml
*interface-source/hello/HelloWorld.java
*server-source/hello/HelloWorldImpl.java
*wsdd-source/server-deploy.wsdd
*client-source/helloc/HelloWorldClient.java
from copying and pasting code in from the appendix and put them into the directory '''/home/mateh/dev/HelloProject/'''. Since the tutorial had me build a script, I can use the script to generate the files I need by simply calling '''ant step1''' and '''ant step2''' (which generates a gar file, which is a Grid Archive file similar in idea to a jar). The gar file that was created on the user mateh must then be copied onto the globus account for it to be deployed. After copying the file into the globus toolkit installation directory, using the command
ant deploy -Dgar.name=/usr/local/globus/gars/hellogrid.gar
I deployed the gar file. It is important to reset the grid container at this point to ensure the new grid service will be deployed. Now that the server implementation has been completed, I can hop back onto the user account mateh and build the client file using '''ant step3''' and then running '''ant run.client'''.

= Implementation Overview =
Implementing the Hello World webservice was easy based on the fact that it required only a few extra installations of packages, and the code was already given and was merely needed to be copied and pasted. This tutorial was far more easier to follow than the previous ones that I have seen, and I would recommend it to people who want to try out a grid computing system. The issue behind implementing these services would seem to me as difficult by first coming up with a job that can be split into multiple jobs and not have the worry of time sensitive deadlines, and once the job has been decided upon, to what amount can it be divided into? This Hello World example simply outputted text on different nodes, hardly a suitable challenge for a grid computing system, but to have to come up with a task that must be thresholded on the amount of divisions of work must take lots of planning. Once this planning has been done, further work must be done into coming up with different ways the grid system will handle invalid data so as to not hinder the operation of that job. Therefore I believe that implementing the Hello World Tutorial was simple based on the given code and explanation, but in a real world situation I think that trying to come up with an application that is grid based as well making sure that it works properly with the grid would be a different matter completely.

=Conclusion=
After setting up my environment, installing the toolkit, and implementing the Hello World tutorial, I can say that the setup and installation of the Globus Toolkit was relatively smooth, and the implementation of an application onto the grid would have been a nightmare had I not found the tutorial that I did. Even though I did say that the tutorial was easy, it does change my mind about how it would be difficult to implement an application on the grid because the Hello World example does not seem like a fair judgement to how complicated the applications that exist on the grid of today. The one thing that I have learned from the following the Globus Toolkit tutorials on the Globus Alliance webpage would be that they have very specific instructions at time, and very vague ones as well. The challenge to getting resources on how to implement a grid computing system also depends vastly on the version you are attempting to install. I have found many different tutorials, such as the ones i mentioned, who are made for earlier versions of the Globus Toolkit, some of which that do not have features that the future ones hold. This causes much confusion for as to what different commands are called and what services may or may not be available. I have looked into other grid computing systems and have also found an alternative method to testing a grid system. The [http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/ Virtual Data Kit] apparently contains a wide variety of distributed computing software that can be easily used, so it seems to be a worthy solution to follow, as well as the implementation of already built services on the grid such as Condor might be something to look into how it is done. Therefore, from my experimentation of the Globus Toolkit 5.0.3, I have concluded that it is simple enough to install the basic services and setup a Certification Authority, but remains difficult to create/implement your own services onto the grid without further knownledge of grid computing and networks in general.

=References=

*Globus Toolkit Admin guide [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/latest-stable/admin/install/#gtadmin] Accessed: Feb 10,2011.
*Globus Toolkit Quickstart guide [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/docs/5.0/5.0.3/admin/quickstart/] Accessed: Feb 10,2011.
*Globus Toolkit installer source [http://www.globus.org/toolkit/downloads/5.0.3/] Accessed: Feb 10,2011.

*Hello World Tutorial [http://www.dutchgrid.nl/install/gang/HowTo-GlobusInstallationExperience.pdf] Accessed: Feb 22,2011.
*Grid Computing (Wiley)[http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=b4LWXLRBRLsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR31&dq=grid+computing&ots=GRUnCeRcOX&sig=opgUj03TBSOWW1agykR8MHTvcIw#v=onepage&q=globus&f=false] Accessed: Feb, 19,2011. (For further understanding of grid computing)
*Grid Cafe [http://www.gridcafe.org/middleware.html] Acccessed: Feb 22,2011.(general knowledge of grid computing systems)
*Virtual Data Toolkit [http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/] Accessed: Feb 23,2011.
*Globus Toolkit Tutorial (Globus Alliance)[http://gdp.globus.org/gt4-tutorial/singlehtml/progtutorial_0.2.1.html] Accessed: Feb 19,2011. (Math application)
*Globus Toolkit Tutorial (Globus Consortium)[http://www.globusconsortium.org/tutorial/] Accessed:Feb 20,2011. (Video editing application)