FIND: Distributed Application Management Service (DAMS)

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

CNS ? 0828923 Birman, Kenneth Cornell University FIND: Distributed Application Management Service (DAMS) Since its inception, the Internet has been a difficult environment for supporting applications offering security, reliability, or other trust properties. Yet we?re seeing a wave of network applications that need to maintain private data (for example, sensitive medical records) or play roles in which correct, fault-tolerant behavior is critical (for example, air traffic control). Each developer has been forced to invent his or her own workarounds to compensate for the limitations of the existing Internet. The central premise of this research is that this represents a dangerous trend and that the research community must do what it can to create new and better options. Intellectual Merit: Cornell University researchers will develop technologies aimed at supporting a new kind of trustworthy distributed computing service on the Internet. The project will have a foundational intellectual impact by showing that what have previously been treated as a dozen separate, often ill-defined functions can be unified into a single conceptually elegant abstraction (distributed role delegation), and by developing the needed science and mathematics to reason about this mechanism. This project aims to help create the next generation of mission-critical networked applications ? systems that can be entrusted with sensitive roles, because they embody solutions shown to have the needed properties Broader Impact: This project seeks to create a useful solution that developers worldwide today lack by creating a powerful, extensible technology that will achieve theoretically optimal performance and scalability, consistent with the constraints imposed by application-specific consistency requirements.