Speaker: Prof. Kai HWANG, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept., Internet and Cluster Computing Laboratory, University of Southern California

Title: Distributed Firewalls and Security Agents for Cluster/Grid and Pervasive Computing

Date: Friday, 9 March 2001

Time: 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue: Room 1403 (Academic Concourse, near lift nos. 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:
In this talk, Dr. Hwang presents a new distributed architecture to achieve high security and reliability in network-based cluster, grid, or pervasive computing environments. He introduces the micro-firewalls and security agents recently developed at USC for distributed security enforcement in these emerging network-computing paradigms. The micro-firewalls are built with agent, Java, and Linux technologies and work as lightweight mobile agents running with low overhead on individual hosts or devices. They communicate with each other using a security protocol built on top of Jini and Java virtual machines. These micro-firewalls work collectively to provide distributed intrusion prevention, detection, and automatic recovery from malicious attacks.

This intrusion repelling architecture greatly elevates the security level of E-commerce, digital society, and many network services, far beyond what can be protected by the traditional gateway firewalls. In particular, he will report the USC work on distributed RAID-x for I/O-centric cluster/grid computing. This RAID-x outperforms the RAID-10, RAID-5, chained-declustering RAID, and NFS in cluster benchmark experiments. Distributed firewalls, mobile agents, and storage networking are demonstrated to work jointly to enhance the security, scalability, and availability of clusters, intranets and extranets all integrated into the Internet.

Dr. Hwang will identify major research challenges and present a few innovative applications in pervasive and cluster/grid computing. He assesses smart network devices, wireless networks, security protocols, and on-demand network services for pervasive computing. The micro-firewalls for clusters can be scaled up or down to satisfy different network services. A reduced-weight version is under development at USC for securing networked devices and smart sensors in pervasive computing. An extended version is also being explored for grid computing. Hwang will assess the development environments of all these security infrastructures in this talk.

Biography:
Qi Hwang is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of Internet and Cluster Computing Laboratory at USC. He received the Ph.D. from the Univ. of California, Berkeley. An IEEE Fellow, he specializes in computer architecture, digital arithmetic, parallel processing, and distributed computing. He is the founding Editor of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He has published six books and over 160 scientific papers in computer areas. His latest book, Scalable Parallel Computing (McGraw-Hill, 1998, co-authored with Zhiwei Xu) deals with scalable multiprocessors and multicomputer clusters. He has received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the PDPTA in 1996.

Prof. Hwang has lectured worldwide as keynote or invited speakers and performed consulting and advisory work for IBM Fishkill, Intel SSD, MIT Lincoln Lab., JPL, Fujitsu and ETL in Japan, CERN Computing School, ITRI and Academia Sinica in Taiwan, TriTech in Singapore, and GMD in Germany, etc. He has chaired numerous IEEE/ACM international conferences including the Cluster2001, HPCA-97, IPPS96, and ICPP-86. Presently, his research work covers Internet/Intranet security, federated E-commerce, cluster I/O subsystems, and smart network devices for pervasive computing. He can be reached by Email: or visit his web site: http://ceng.usc.edu/~kaihwang