seminar: Security vs. Costs and Energy in Clouds
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Monday, October 19, 2009 |
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Security vs. Costs and Energy in Clouds |
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Radu Sion, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Stony Brook University |
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12:00pm |
Talk Abstract
We aim to understand the economics of clouds and explore whether they make sense. We show the answer is mostly yes, but only for compute intensive applications with at least 1950 cycles / 32-bit input data word (peanut counting does not qualify). We then explore the dollar cost of security, in particular in (untrusted) outsourced and cloud computing environments. To this end we derive the composite end-to-end cost of a CPU cycle in various environments. We evaluate the cost of common cryptography and find out how many unforgeable signatures the cost of a Brooklyn latte buys. Finally we ask whether securing outsourced data and computation against curious and untrusted clouds is viable and encounter a surprise: today's answer is mostly no -- securing outsourced cycles against untrusted clouds is costlier than the gained savings. We'll see in this talk why. We illustrate in a cloud computing setting, yet we (secretly) hope this type of reasoning will initiate a new current of practical, bottom-line aware designs of security protocols and systems in general.
Speaker Bio
Radu is heading the Stony Brook Network Security and Applied
Cryptography (NSAC) Lab. His research lies in the areas of Information
Assurance, Applied Cryptography and Network Security. He builds
systems mainly, but enjoys ellegance and foundations, especially if of
the very rare practical variety. Sponsors and collaborators include
IBM, IBM Research, Motorola, NOKIA, Xerox, as well as the National
Science Foundation. Radu is on the steering board and organizing
committees of conferences such as NDSS, Oakland S&P, CCS, USENIX
Security, SIGMOD, ICDE, FC a.o.