Abstracts

Sir Maurice Wilkes

Moore's Law and the Future

It is clear that we are within sight of the point at which further shrinkage of CMOS circuits will become impossible for physical reasons. This point will be signaled by sharply increasing costs. I shall comment on how Moore's law is seen by the Semiconductor Industries which is responsible for the publication of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, and on the problems that will eventually bring to an end the regular doubling of the number of components that can be put on a chip. Further advances will surely take place, but it is hard to figure out what they will be or when they will take place. I shall comment on the outlook as I see it, but I lay no claim to special insights.

Frank Kelly

Theoretical Limits on Distributed Congestion Control

Internet congestion control can be viewed as a resource allocation mechanism implemented via a distributed computation by end-systems. It provides a concrete, measurable example of an economic tatonnement process, with TCP's congestion avoidance algorithms playing the role of a `Walrasian auctioneer' searching for market clearing allocations. What are the theoretical limitations upon what can be achieved by such a distributed computation? In this talk we review recent progress, and discuss the constraints imposed by: limited information available to end-systems; the finite speed of light; inherent randomness; and incentive compatibility.

Uday Reddy

Correctness of Data Representations Involoving Heap Data Structures

A major aim of giving semantics to imperative and object-oriented programming languages in recent years has been to support the information hiding that goes on in such languages, in particular, relational reasoning principles for showing the correctness of data representations also referred to as "data refinement"). The situation for programs with local variables is by now well-understood. But, similar semantics for programs that deal with heap data structures and pointers has proved elusive. In this talk, we report on a first semantic model for languages with heap data structures that validates data refinement. The model is built using a general framework for information hiding based on relational parametricity. The novelty is in finding appropriate relational correspondences that account for information leakage or "extrusion" that becomes possible with pointer data.

Simon Moore

Smartcard Defence Technologies

The mass adoption of embedded computing devices (mobile phones, PDAs, smartcards, etc) is moving us rapidly into the ubiquitous computing age. If these devices are to be a boon rather than a bane then robustness is critical. Security will be increasingly important, not only for traditional roles like payment mechanisms and access control, but also for peer to peer transactions and new business structures. Smartcards are an early embodiment of consumer security devices. They present a harder target for the criminal underworld than their magnetic strip counterparts. However, for several years now it has been know that microprocessors can leak a lot of useful information through power and electromagnetic emissions. These emissions (often referred to as "side channels") are characteristic of conventional clocked digital circuit designs. Fault injection techniques have also been used to trick devices into fault modes which leak additional information. As part of an EU funded project (G3Card) we have been collaborating with industrial and academic partners to develop technologies for the 3rd Generation of Smartcards. In Cambridge we have played both black hat and white hat roles so that we can evaluate what we have designed in much the same way that a good locksmith must also understand how to be a good lock pick. This lecture will review our design strategies, from concept to VLSI implementation. Results will be presented from formal verification of components to bench experiments on naked chips.

Brendan Murphy Award Lecture

Brian Randell

Concurrent Exception Handling and Resolution in Distributed Object Systems

We address the problem of how to handle exceptions in distributed object systems. In a distributed computing environment exceptions may be raised simultaneously in different processing nodes and need to be treated in a coordinated manner. Mishandling concurrent exceptions can lead to catastrophic consequences. We take two kinds of concurrency into account, arising from: (i) several objects that are designed collectively and invoked concurrently to achieve a global goal, and (ii) multiple objects (or object groups) that are designed independently and compete for the same system resources. A new distributed algorithm for resolving concurrent exceptions has been developed - and several case studies undertaken. These include one that involved the design, implementation and validation of a control system for the "Fault-Tolerant Production Cell", a safety-critical system design challenge posed by FZI (Forschungszentrum Informatik). Joint work with Jie Xu and Alexander Romanovsky.

Sugih Jamin

On the Existence and Origin of Power Laws in AS-Level Internet Topologies

In a recent paper, Faloutsos et al. found that the inter Autonomous System (AS) topology exhibits a power-law vertex degree distribution. This result was quite unexpected in the networking community and stirred significant interest in exploring the possible causes of this phenomenon. The work of Barabasi and Albert and its application to network topology generation in the work of Medina et al. have explored a promising class of models that yield strict power-law vertex degree distributions. In this talk I will descibe our efforts to re-examine the BGP measurements that form the basis for the results reported in the paper by Faloutsos et al. We find that by their very nature (i.e., being strictly BGP-based), the data provides a very incomplete picture of Internet connectivity at the AS level. I will also describe our attempts to construct and validate a more complete AS-level topology. The AS peering relationship maps constructed from NLANR data typically miss 20-50% or even more of the relationships found in our more complete AS maps. Subsequently, we find that while the vertex degree distributions resulting from the extended maps are heavy-tailed, they deviate significantly from a strict power law. Finally, we show that available historical data does not support the connectivity-based dynamics assumed in the paper by Barabasi and Albert. Together, our results suggest that the Internet topology at the AS level may well have developed over time following a very different set of growth processes than those proposed by Barabasi and Albert.

Angela Sasse

More than Meets the Eye: The impact of Media Quality on Users