Technical reports

Resource control of untrusted code in an open network environment

Paul B. Menage

March 2003, 185 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted June 2000 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Magdalene College.

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DOI: 10.48456/tr-561

Abstract

Current research into Active Networks, Open Signalling and other forms of mobile code have made use of the ability to execute user-supplied code at locations within the network infrastructure, in order to avoid the inherent latency associated with wide area networks or to avoid sending excessive amounts of data across bottleneck links or nodes. Existing research has addressed the design and evaluation of programming environments, and testbeds have been implemented on traditional operating systems. Such work has deferred issues regarding resource control; this has been reasonable, since this research has been conducted in a closed environment.

In an open environment, which is required for widespread deployment of such technologies, the code supplied to the network nodes may not be from a trusted source. Thus, it cannot be assumed that such code will behave non-maliciously, nor that it will avoid consuming more than its fair share of the available system resources.

The computing resources consumed by end-users on programmable nodes within a network are not free, and must ultimately be paid for in some way. Programmable networks allow users substantially greater complexity in the way that they may consume network resources. This dissertation argues that, due to this complexity, it is essential to be able control and account for the resources used by untrusted user-supplied code if such technology is to be deployed effectively in a wide-area open environment.

The Resource Controlled Active Node Environment (RCANE) is presented to facilitate the control of untrusted code. RCANE supports the allocation, scheduling and accounting of the resources available on a node, including CPU and network I/O scheduling, memory allocation, and garbage collection overhead.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-561,
  author =	 {Menage, Paul B.},
  title = 	 {{Resource control of untrusted code in an open network
         	   environment}},
  year = 	 2003,
  month = 	 mar,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-561.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-561},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-561}
}