Colloquium Archive

Large-scale distributed systems must be built to anticipate and mitigate a variety of hardware and software failures. In order to build confidence that fault-tolerant systems are correctly implemented, an increasing number of large-scale sites regularly run failure drills in which faults are deliberately injected in production or staging systems. While fault injection infrastructures are becoming relatively mature, existing approaches either explore the combinatorial space of potential failures randomly or exploit the “hunches” of domain experts to guide the search. Random strategies waste resources testing “uninteresting” faults, while programmer-guided approaches are only as good as the intuition of a programmer and only scale with human effort. The subject of this talk covers intuition, experience and research directions related to lineage-driven fault injection (LDFI), a novel approach to automating failure testing. LDFI utilizes existing tracing or logging infrastructures to work backwards from good outcomes, identifying redundant computations that allow it to aggressively prune the space of faults that must be explored via fault injection. I will describe LDFI’s theoretical roots in the database research notion of provenance, present early results from the field, and present opportunities for near- and long-term future research.

Year after year, we see reports on an ever increasing gap, both in the public and private sectors, between the number of computer security professional we need and the number we expect to produce. While the reasons for this trend are varied, there is a perception (particularly among those new to computing) that security can be asocial and isolating, that it is void of creativity and individual expression, and lacks positive social relevance. But, as we all know, security can inherently have all of these qualities, which perhaps manifest themselves most clearly in cybersecurity games. Indeed, the freedoms of play inherent in games may directly address the qualities deficient in security pedagogy, with many educators now turning to security games, in and out of the classroom, as a meaningful tool for outreach and education. This talk takes a critical look at the use of games, and explores some ways that games can (and cannot) fix computer security education.