Section: Research Program

Security

Because of its large size and complex software structure, geo-distributed applications and infrastructures are particularly exposed to security and privacy issues  [90]. They are subject to numerous security vulnerabilities that are frequently exploited by malicious attackers in order to exfiltrate personal, institutional or corporate data. Securing these systems require security and privacy models and corresponding techniques that are applicable at all software layers in order to guard interactions at each level but also between levels. However, very few security models exist for the lower layers of the software stack and no model enables the handling of interactions involving the complete software stack. Any modification to its implementation, deployment status, configuration, etc., may introduce new or trigger existing security and privacy issues. Finally, applications that execute on top of the software stack may introduce security issues or be affected by vulnerabilities of the stack. Overall, security and privacy issues are therefore interdependent with all other activities of the STACK team and constitute an important research topic for the team.

As part of the STACK activities, we consider principally security and privacy issues related to the vertical and horizontal compositions of software components forming the software stack and the distributed applications running on top of it. Modifications to the vertical composition of the software stack affect different software levels at once. As an example, side-channel attacks often target virtualized services (i.e., services running within VMs); attackers may exploit insecure hardware caches at the system level to exfiltrate data from computations at the higher level of VM services  [84], [100]. Security and privacy issues also affect horizontal compositions, that is, compositions of software abstractions on one level: most frequently horizontal compositions are considered on the level of applications/services but they are also relevant on the system level or the middleware level, such as compositions involving encryption and database fragmentation services.

The STACK members aim at addressing two main research issues: enabling full-stack (vertical) security and per-layer (horizontal) security. Both of these challenges are particularly hard in the context of large geo-distributed systems because they are often executed on heterogeneous infrastructures and are part of different administrative domains and governed by heterogeneous security and privacy policies. For these reasons they typically lack centralized control, are frequently subject to high latency and are prone to failures.

Concretely, we will consider two classes of security and privacy issues in this context. First, on a general level, we strive for a method for the programming and reasoning about compositions of security and privacy mechanisms including, but not limited to, encryption, database fragmentation and watermarking techniques. Currently, no such general method exists, compositions have only been devised for specific and limited cases, for example, compositions that support the commutation of specific encryption and watermarking techniques  [76], [48]. We provided preliminary results on such compositions  [49] and have extended them to biomedical, notably genetic, analyses in the e-health domain  [41]. Second, on the level of security and privacy properties, we will focus on isolation properties that can be guaranteed through vertical and horizontal composition techniques. We have proposed first results in this context in form of a compositional notion of distributed side channel attacks that operate on the system and middleware levels  [37].

It is noteworthy that the STACK members do not have to be experts on the individual security and privacy mechanisms, such as watermarking and database fragmentation. We are, however, well-versed in their main properties so that we can integrate them into our composition model. We also interact closely with experts in these techniques and the corresponding application domains, notably e-health for instance, in the context of the PrivGen project(Privacy-preserving sharing and processing of genetic data, https://privgen.cominlabs.u-bretagneloire.fr/fr), see Section 9.1.

More generally, we highlight that security issues in distributed systems are very closely related to the other STACK challenges, dimensions and research directions. Guaranteeing security properties across the software stack and throughout software layers in highly volatile and heterogeneous geo-distributed systems is expected to harness and contribute results to the self-management capabilities investigated as part of the team's resource management challenges. Furthermore, security and privacy properties are crosscutting concerns that are intimately related to the challenges of application life cycle management. Similarly, the security issues are also closely related to the team's work on programming support. This includes new means for programming, notably in terms of event and stream programming, but also the deployment and reconfiguration challenges, notably concerning automated deployment. As a crosscutting functionality, the security challenges introduced above must be met in an integrated fashion when designing, constructing, executing and adapting distributed applications as well as managing distributed resources.