Abstract
Traditional software and security patch update delivery mechanisms rely on a client/server approach where clients pull updates from servers regularly. This approach, however, suffers a high window of vulnerability (WOV) for clients and the risk of a single point of failure. Overlay-based information dissemination schemes overcome these problems, but often incur high infrastructure cost to set up and maintain individual information dissemination networks. Against this backdrop, we propose iDispatcher, a planet-scale, flexible and secure information dissemination platform. iDispatcher uses a hybrid approach with both push- and pull-based information dissemination to reduce the WOV period and achieve high distribution coverage. iDispatcher also uses a peer-to-peer based architecture to achieve higher scalability. We develop a self-contained key management mechanism for iDispatcher. Our prototype for iDispatcher is deployed on more than 500 PlanetLab nodes distributed around the world. Experimental results show that iDispatcher can have small dissemination latency for time-critical applications, is highly tunable to optimize the tradeoff between bandwidth and latency, and works resiliently against different attacks such as flooding attacks.
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The work is partially supported by Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM. Los Alamos National Laboratory Publication No. LA-UR 11-02386
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Rahman, M.S., Yan, G., Madhyastha, H.V. et al. iDispatcher: A unified platform for secure planet-scale information dissemination. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 6, 46–60 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-012-0128-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-012-0128-8