Group Essay 2

Hello Group. Please post your information here. I assume everybody read the email at your connect account. Anyone specific wants to send him the email with the group members inside? If not, I just go ahead tomorrow at about 13:00 and send the email with the group members who wrote their contact information in here. - Sschnei1 03:25, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Sebastian Schneider sschnei1@connect.carleton.ca

Matthew Chou mchou2@connect.carleton.ca

Mark Walts mwalts@connect.carleton.ca

Henry Irving hirving@connect.carleton.ca

Jean-Benoit Aubin jbaubin@connect.carleton.ca

Pradhan Nishant npradhan npradhan@connect.carleton.ca

Only Paul Cox didn't answer i sent this morning.

Cox Paul pcox

And I just sent an email to the teacher.

--Jean-Benoit

Paper

the paper's title, authors, and their affiliations. Include a link to the paper and any particularly helpful supplementary information.

Title: Accountable Virtual Machines

Authors: Andreas Haeberlen, Paarijaat Aditya, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Peter Druschel

Affiliates: University of Pennsylvania, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)]

Link to Paper: Accountable Virtual Machines

Background Concepts

Explain briefly the background concepts and ideas that your fellow classmates will need to know first in order to understand your assigned paper.

Accountable Virtual Machine (AVM)

Deterministic Replay: A machine can record its executions into a file so that it can be replayed in order to see the executions and follow what was happening on the machine. Simple replaying is not sufficient for the purposes of finding changes/cheats in a system because the data being outputted into the replay may be tampered with by the system so that it generates optimal results. Remus [1] has contributed a highly efficient snapshotting mechanism for these replays, and its usage can be directly benefit the AVM.

Accountability: Accountability in the context of this paper means that every action done on the virtual machine is recorded and will be used against the machine or user to verify the correctness of the application. The AVM is responsible of its action and will answers for its action against an auditor.

Remote Fault Detection: There are programs like GridCop [2] that can be used to the progress and execution of a remotely executing program by receiving packets. When the remote computer is sending the packets, the receiving/logging computer must be a trusted computer (hardware,software, OS) so that the receiving of packets remains consistent. To detect a fault in a remote system, every packet must arrive safely, and any interrupts during the logging must be handled or the inconsistencies will result in an inaccurate outcome. The AVM does not require trusted hardware and can be used over wide-area networks.

Cheat Detection: Cheating in games or any specific modification in a program can be either scanned [3][4] for or prevented [5][6] by certain programs. The issue with these scanning and preventative software is the knowledge/awareness of specific cheats or situations that the software can handle. An AVM is designed to counter any kind of general cheat.

Research problem

What is the research problem being addressed by the paper? How does this problem relate to past related work?

Contribution

What are the research contribution(s) of this work? Specifically, what are the key research results, and what do they mean? (What was implemented? Why is it any better than what came before?)

Critique

What is good and not-so-good about this paper? You may discuss both the style and content; be sure to ground your discussion with specific references. Simple assertions that something is good or bad is not enough - you must explain why.

References

You will almost certainly have to refer to other resources; please cite these resources in the style of citation of the papers assigned (inlined numbered references). Place your bibliographic entries in this section.

[1] B. Cully, G. Lefebvre, D. Meyer, M. Feeley, N. Hutchinson, and A. Warfield. Remus: High availability via asynchronous virtual machine replication. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Apr. 2008.

[2] S. Yang, A. R. Butt, Y. C. Hu, and S. P. Midkiff. Trust but verify: Monitoring remotely executing programs for progress and correctness. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), June 2005.

[3] G. Hoglund. 4.5 million copies of EULA-compliant spyware. http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358.

[4] PunkBuster web site. http://www.evenbalance.com/.

[5] N. E. Baughman, M. Liberatore, and B. N. Levine. Cheat-proof playout for centralized and peer-to-peer gaming. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 15(1):1–13, Feb. 2007.

[6] C. M¨onch, G. Grimen, and R. Midtstraum. Protecting online games against cheating. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames), Oct. 2006.

Discussion

We can use this area to discuss or leave notes on general ideas or whatever you want to write here.

-The current due date posted on the site for this essay is November 25th --Mchou2 05:18, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

-I think that since we are given the headings to this article, we can easily choose what parts each member would like to work on, obviously since there are more members than parts, multiple members will have to work on the same parts or can work on all parts, I guess it's really up to you. I know that most people have a lot of projects coming up so let's try to get this done asap, or at least bit by bit so it's not something we have to worry too much about. --Mchou2 05:18, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

- I would like to do the Contribution or Critique. -- Sschnei1 02:40, 20 November 2010 (UTC)