Application Communities: A Collaborative Approach To Software Security
Angelos Keromytis
Department of Computer Science
Columbia University
Abstract
Software monocultures are usually considered dangerous because their
size and uniformity represent the potential for costly and widespread
damage. The emerging concept of collaborative security provides the
opportunity to re-examine the utility of software monoculture by
exploiting the homogeneity and scale that typically define large
software monocultures. Monoculture can be leveraged to improve an
application's overall security and reliability. We introduce and
explore the concept of Application Communities: collections of large
numbers of independent instances of the same application. Members of
an application community share the burden of monitoring for flaws and
attacks, and notify the rest of the community when such are
detected. Appropriate mitigation mechanisms are then deployed against
the newly discovered fault.
In this talk, I will describe the concept of Application Communities,
some of their basic operational parameters, and our preliminary work
in demonstrating their feasibility.
Biography
Angelos Keromytis is an Associate Professor with the Department of
Computer Science at Columbia University, and director of the Network
Security Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from
the University of Crete, Greece, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the
Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department, University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author and co-author of more than 100 papers
on refereed conferences and journals. He recently co-authored a book
on using graphics cards for security, and is a founder of Revive
Systems Inc. His current research interests revolve around systems and
network security, and cryptography.
His recent work has been
on self-healing software. Previous research interests include active
networks, trust management systems, and systems issues involving
hardware cryptographic acceleration. For a full CV, see http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~angelos/cv.html.