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PORTIA. Security Challenges for Rich-Media Educational Environments. Robert Grimm New York University. The Chasm in Medicine. Scientific knowledge Rapid advances in molecular biology Medical practice Reduced lengths-of-stay in hospitals Increased compartmentalization
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PORTIA Security Challenges for Rich-MediaEducational Environments Robert Grimm New York University
The Chasm in Medicine • Scientific knowledge • Rapid advances in molecular biology • Medical practice • Reduced lengths-of-stay in hospitals • Increased compartmentalization • Chasm is self-widening • Specialization helps keep up with sciences, costs down • Existing solutions do not work • Outpatient care for education, PCPs for practice • Result: Ever harder to train “good” physicians
Crossing the Chasm:The IRMEE Project at NYU • NYU-wide collaboration • Medicine, computer science, libraries, center for teaching excellence, center for advanced technology, IT • Goal: Integration • Across specializations • Between theory and practice • Across geographical boundaries and time • Chosen approach: Web-based rich-media environment • Provides lifelong access to educational & scientific content • Structures content along narrative lines • Fosters community of students and practitioners
Prototypes in Use, Have Impact • Complemented by guided discussion on bulletin board
Where Do We Go from Here? • Content • Better evaluations through script concordance tests • More modules • Authoring is labor- and resource-intensive, does not scale • Focus on exchanging content with other authors • XML schema being co-developed with University of Pittsburgh • Delivery infrastructure • Existing multi-tier architecture does not scale • We need a scalable and affordable solution • Focus for the rest of this talk, but keep IRMEE in mind
Building a Scalable & AffordableImplementation Platform • Active CDN (Content Distribution Network) • Interposes on client/server interactions (DNS redirection) • Authoritative content remains on server • Caches static content • Executes application-specific scripts • For dynamic content creation as well as transformation • Why another edge-side computing platform? • Familiar programming model for web developers • As added benefit, easier to provide resource controls, security • General structured overlay: Distributed Hash Table • Easier to leverage advances in peer-to-peer technologies
Integrity and Privacy Issuesfor Active CDNs • Nodes in peer-to-peer overlay generally untrusted • Though, local nodes may be trusted • Connection-oriented security (SSL) inappropriate • End-to-end negates CDN, hop-by-hop negates security • Resource-oriented security required • Servers sign or encrypt content • Trusted proxy verifies signatures, decrypts content • What about dynamically generated/transformed content? • Scripts still may execute on any node (for p2p load balancing) • But trusted proxy probabilistically verifies dynamic contentand adjusts reputation based on results
What’s Missing? • Reputation-based security model • Selection of content to verify • Scoring and accumulation of results • Exchange of results • Centralized blacklists vs. web of trust • HTTP extensions for resource-based security • Beware of interaction with caching • E.g., sign only headers but not body, include hash of body • Experiences from real deployment • On the Wild Wild Web, surprising things may happen • E.g., see Pai et al., The Dark Side of the Web, HotNets ‘03
The Larger Issue • Securely placing functionality (computations & storage) on untrusted nodes placed between clients and servers