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Events for August 09, 2016
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USC Graduate Engineering Info Session: Delhi
Tue, Aug 09, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
These events will be hosted by Sudha Kumar, Director of the USC India Office. Special guest speaker Dr. Sandeep Gupta, Professor and Chair of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, will also join this event.
Each 2-hour information session will include a presentation on:
Master's & Ph.D. Programs in Engineering and Computer Science
How to Apply
Scholarships and Funding
Student Life at USC and in Los Angeles
Attendees will also have the chance to ask questions and receive official brochures and handout information from USC.
Register to Attend
Location: Shangri-La's Eros Hotel, Delhi
Audiences: Students with an undergraduate background in engineering, computer science, math or physical science
Contact: Sudha Kumar
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PhD Defense Luis Pedrosa
Tue, Aug 09, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Workshops & Infosessions
Title: "Systematic Analysis of Network Protocol Implementations"
Location: SAL 213
Time: 3:00pm -“ 5:00pm, Tuesday, August 9th 2016
PhD Candidate: Luis Pedrosa
Committee Members:
Ramesh Govindan
William G.J. Halfond
Murali Annavaram
Todd Millstein
Ratul Mahajan
Abstract:
As networked systems become more complex, and as interactions between distributed entities become more subtle, our ability to analyze such systems has fallen behind. Failing to keep up with the ever increasing amount of software interactions that these systems can potentially be subject to can lead to software glitches which, if unmitigated, can lead to costly and embarrassing outages and even data loss. It is clear the community needs better tools to analyze these systems and to better understand their behavior under varying circumstances.
Towards this end we start by presenting one such analysis specifically tailored towards the problem of protocol interoperability: the Protocol Interoperability Checker or PIC. PIC uses symbolic execution to explore the space of messages used by a protocol sender and receiver to communicate. By finding messages the sender can generate but that the receiver subsequently determines to be invalid, PIC can find scenarios where interoperability breaks down. To scale such an analysis to real-world implementations we make several key novel contributions, including joint symbolic execution that constrains the receiver-side analysis based on results from the sender, and a custom form of directed symbolic execution, that guides the analysis towards meaningful results. On mature implementations of two protocols, PIC found thousands of instances of non-interoperabilities, across multiple message types and fault causes. Many of the issues have been acknowledged as undesirable by developers and some have already been fixed.
We then move on to generalize our work on PIC to address two new challenges, handling arbitrary networked systems and checking more general correctness properties. By extending joint symbolic execution with concepts borrowed from model checking, we build a more general conversational analysis. Conversational analysis implements a detailed symbolic network model that supports communication with multiple messages between multiple parties, while also considering the effects of concurrency, and message loss and reordering. In effect, we create a novel approach to exploring the outcomes of a distributed system while varying both its inputs and the underlying network dynamics. We show that conversational analysis is able to analyze Redis, a popular key-value store, and reproduce a complex known bug, as well as nuanced injected faults.
Finally, we address the challenge of checking more general correctness properties. By exporting our analysis capabilities as a set of operations in a toolkit we call the Systematic Protocol Analysis Framework or SPA, we allow users to 'script' new analyses more flexibly.
These scripts then produce direct value to developers, enabling, as we show, novel systematic analyses for interoperability, security, correctness, and reliability.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
