The performance evaluation of Personal Clouds (e.g., Dropbox, Box) is challenging due to their distributed architecture and the absence of realistic workload generators that reproduce the disparate types of user behavior in the system. To solve this, we propose a novel storage benchmarking methodology in which the workload is generated by emulating groups of users that exhibit a similar behavior, namely, user stereotypes. We instantiate this methodology in BenchBox, a distributed performance analysis tool that integrates:
- A complete model that reproduces the aspects of user behavior that matter to system’s performance, including file sizes and contents, locality and burstiness properties.
- A centralized management and real-time monitoring system of Personal Cloud desktop clients.
- BenchBox also uses compact files to represent user stereotypes, enabling researchers to share only the behavior of users, instead of private traces.
The code is available at: https://github.com/cloudspaces/BenchBox
PrivySeal: Share data on the cloud privately!
PrivySeal is a software that provides easily usable privacy technologies to end users who want to share their data on any cloud service. It is based on published research and employs crowdsourcing and a psychologically grounded model for risk estimation. PrivySeal provides three key services: 1) It determines the risk of sharing data items on the cloud; 2) it provides recommendations for risk mitigation and finally 3) it provides privacy enhancing technologies to mitigate the risk.
Software Overview
PrivySeal provides client side privacy enhancing technologies to end-users.
Some of the main features of the client-side include:
- Encrpytion: PrivySeal allows users to encrypt their files.
- Face Blurring: PrivySeal detects faces in images and allows users to blur them.
- Hiding image parts: PrivySeal provides users the very attractive feature of manually selecting any part of an image and then blurring it.
- Hiding metadata: PrivySeal can extract metadata from a wide variety of files and allows the users to hide any metadata item..
- Thumbnail Generation: PrivySeal allows users to generate thumbnails of documents and images to share on the cloud along-with encrypted data items
The server side component has been implemented separately but is not part of this current release. However, it will soon be integrated here.
The server side component aggregates data from different clients and after each sharing operation from the clients, the context of the item and the policy applied are sent to the server. The server side then based on the processing and analysis of the crowdsourced information, guides users about the privacy risk that is posed by sharing diff erent items in di fferent contexts. We use Item Response Theory (IRT) which is a well-known psychometric function that has been widely used in psychology, education, public health, and computer adaptive testing.
The server side shall also provide recommendations to clients on what policies to apply to different data items in order to mitigate risk.
SOURCE CODE
PrivySeal is available online at : https://privyseal.epfl.ch
eyeOS is a web platform that provides a remote virtual desktop for the end user.
The overall user experience is strongly influenced by the classic desktop design, widely known thanks to the most popular operating system on the market. eyeOS Personal Web Desktop includes several features such as: file manager, contacts, groups and other collaborative capabilities. eyeOS Personal Web Desktop is a disruptive technology that fits in perfectly with the CloudSpaces Open Personal Cloud paradigm.
One of the key values that eyeOS provides is the possibility to work directly with files in the cloud. eyeOS does not require users to manually download any files onto their computer nor is it necessary to install anything locally, so the experience is totally transparent: users just log into a website and start working with their files normally.
Within the eyeOS platform, one of its key features is file management. It provides an interface that allows the user to access the files stored in their Personal Cloud directly from the browser, with an experience similar to the file manager of any desktop operating system, such as Microsoft Windows or GNU/Linux. For example users can see any documents they have stored online on Stacksync and NEC, create directories, move files, share documents, etc.
In order for eyeOS to provide these services to the user, it needs to communicate with the Personal Cloud to obtain all the user information it needs. This communication is made using the Storage API and it provides all the resources necessary that allows the user to manage their files efficiently.
User can share their information with other users, regardless of the Personal Cloud that they use (interoperability). For example, a Stacksync user can share files with another Stacksync user of with another NEC user. eyeOS provides an interface that helps the user at all times to decide whether the carpet should continue to be shared and which users may access it.
Hybris is a key-value hybrid cloud storage system that robustly replicates data over untrusted public clouds while keeping metadata on trusted private premises.
Thanks to this design, Hybris provides strong consistency guarantees (i.e., linearizability) and affordable Byzantine fault tolerance (i.e., withstanding f faulty clouds with as few as 2f+1 replicas).
Hybris is also very efficient: in the common case it writes to f+1 clouds and read from only a single cloud.
For more information and detailed benchmarks read our technical report.
Code base overview
Hybris code base is composed by two main modules: MdsManager and KvsManager, the first being a thin wrapper layer of the metadata distributed storage service (i.e. Zookeeper), while the latter implements the storage primitives towards the APIs of the main public cloud storage services - currently, it supports Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Rackspace Cloudfiles and Windows Azure Blob.
Maven is used for building and managing dependencies.
Read the wiki for more information on development setup.
Authors and license
Hybris has been developed at EURECOM as part of the CloudSpaces European research project.
Its code is released under the terms of Apache 2.0 license.
The source code is available at the GitHub's project page: https://github.com/pviotti/hybris
Ubuntu One helps you store, sync and share stuff. With both free and paid subscription levels, Ubuntu One helps you sync your files, share your work with others or work remotely, all with your Ubuntu computer.
The Ubuntu One client software and protocol libraries are open source, and we are building a suite of APIs to enable all kinds of different applications to use a clean and simple sync infrastructure for everything from desktop to mobile handset. Currently Ubuntu One syncs your files from your desktop to the web, and other services are coming soon.
You can discuss the Ubuntu One software and service on the mailing list at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuone-users
And you can sign up for Ubuntu One here: https://one.ubuntu.com/
