Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
DRAM retains its contents for several seconds after power is lost. Although DRAM becomes less reliable when it is not refreshed, it is not immediately erased, and...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Chilly Sense of Security
Many systems rely on keeping a master key secret. But technological progress can undermine old assumptions.
From Communications of the ACM
Integrating Nand Flash Devices Onto Servers
In this paper, we examine the use of Flash storage in the server domain. Wear-out has the potential to limit the use of Flash in this domain. To seriously consider...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Integrating Flash Devices
Flash memory nowadays seems to be in every discussion about system architecture. Sure enough, flash memory boasts...
From Communications of the ACM
Relative Fitness Modeling
Relative fitness is a new approach to modeling the performance of storage devices. In contrast to a conventional model, which predicts the performance of an application's...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Disk Array Models For Automating Storage Management
Large disk arrays are everywhere. When we shop at an Internet retailer, the product and account data come from a disk...
From Communications of the ACM
Learning and Detecting Emergent Behavior in Networks of Cardiac Myocytes
We address the problem of specifying and detecting emergent behavior in networks of cardiac myocytes, spiral electric waves in particular, a precursor to atrial...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Where Biology Meets Computing
Alan Turing died in 1954 in his laboratory after eating a cyanide-laced apple. During his last years, Turing had become interested in bio-chemical systems. He had...
From Communications of the ACM
Error Correction Up to the Information-Theoretic Limit
Ever since the birth of coding theory almost 60 years ago, researchers have been pursuing the elusive goal of constructing the "best codes," whose encoding introduces...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: The Beauty of Error-Correcting Codes
Error-correcting codes are the means by which we compensate for interference in communication, and are essential for the accurate transmission and storage of digital...
From Communications of the ACM
Building Secure Web Applications With Automatic Partitioning
Swift is a new, principled approach to building Web applications that are secure by construction. Swift automatically partitions application code while providing...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Tools For Information to Flow Securely and Swift-ly
Back in the old days of the Web (before 1995), Web browsers were fairly simple devices. The server's Web interface was simple enough that an auditor could at least...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Patching Program Errors
C programmers are are all too familiar with out-of-bounds memory errors. The paper here presents an intriguing technique for...
From Communications of the ACM
Exterminator: Automatically Correcting Memory Errors with High Probability
Programs written in C and C++ are susceptible to memory errors, including buffer overflows and dangling pointers. We present Exterminator, a system that automatically...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safeguarding Online Information Against Failures and Attacks
Users need storage that is highly reliable (it is not lost) and highly available (accessible when needed). Guaranteeing...
From Communications of the ACM
Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance
A longstanding vision in distributed systems is to build reliable systems from unreliable components. An enticing formulation of this vision is Byzantine fault-tolerant...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Transactional Memory in the Operating System
The long tradition of building ever-faster processors is ending, with the computer industry instead putting more...
From Communications of the ACM
Distributed Selection: A Missing Piece of Data Aggregation
In this article, we study the problem of distributed selection from a theoretical point of view. Given a general connected graph of diameter D consisting of n nodes...
From Communications of the ACM
TxLinux and MetaTM: Transactional Memory and the Operating System
TxLinux is the first operating system to use hardware transactional memory (HTM) as a synchronization primitive, and the first to manage HTM in the scheduler. TxLinux...
From Communications of the ACM