CryptMPI: A Fast Encrypted MPI Library

 As more #HPC applications move to cloud infrastructure, securing and protecting HPC sensitive data in such an environment becomes critical.

But HPC solution tends to fall short when it comes to security. Security features tend to be perceived as detrimental to the performance of the applications.

By example, encrypted communication has always been seen as incurring very significant overheads when you are aiming for microsecond latency.

The author of the Crypt MPI paper demonstrates that you can ensure the privacy and integrity of sensitive data with minimal performance degradation using an enhance MPI library.

I hope to see this kind of feature integrated as standard in a future version of MPI.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06471

Code: https://github.com/abu-naser/CryptMPI-A-Fast-Encrypted-MPI-Library

[Links of the Day] 30/06/2020 : Homomorphic encryption for Machine Learning, Neural Network on Silicon, Python Graph visualization library

• PySyft : Python framework for homomorphic encryption for Machine learning. It allows you to train model on encrypted data without the need to decrypt it. It's 40x slower than normal method but you this means you don't have to deal with the new EU regulation on AI. 
• Neural Networks on Silicon : a collection of papers and works on Neural Networks on Silicontopic
• Pygraphistry :  Python visual graph analytics library to extract, transform, and load big graphs in Graphistry 

[Links of the Day] 10/03/2020 : NLP models platform for elasticsearch, Encrypted Tensor flow framework, Reformer transformer machine learning model

• nboost : scalable, search-api-boosting platform for deploying transformer models to improve the relevance of search results on different platforms (i.e. Elasticsearch)
• tf-encrypted : encrypted tensor flow. This allows you to work on an encrypted dataset for generating models. It's privacy (??) preserving machine learning framework [github]
• reformer : while most transformers are limited to a short number of tokens (512.. maybe more). Google folks came up with a new architecture called Reformer that leverage locality preserving hashing that blast past this limation and a allow handling context windows of up to 1 million words, all on a single accelerator and using only 16GB of memory.[arxiv]

[Links of the Day] 15/01/2019 : Incident Response best practice, Database Schema Crawler, Fingerprinting TLS

• ja3 : something I discovered recently. Apparently, you can fingerprint SSL and TLS session in order to identify the service being run behind the encrypted socket. Really awesome if you want to spot malware or bitcoin miner on your network. Or pretty much any other services as long as you have a fingerprint to compare with.
• SchemaCrawler : a cool tool for database schema discovery. This is a must when you have to take on board a legacy DB system that lacks clear documentation. 
• Incident response : pager duty open sourced they incident response process. This is a really great set of tools, process and best practice for incident response. What is even more eye-opening is the part the describe the incident resolution scenario that didn't work and point out some great anti-patterns. A must read for any SRE team out there and anybody else that has an on-call duty and their managers.

[Links of the Day] 10/10/2017 : Machine Learning Hardware acceleration , Homomorphic encryption

• Tutorial on Hardware Architectures for Deep Neural Networks : How to leverage hardware for accelerating machine learning processes. 
• A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes : this paper presents a thorough survey of the state of homomorphic encryption schemes. Homomorphic encryption allows manipulation of the encrypted data without the need to decrypt it. This will allow when hardware will be fast enough to deal with the complexity of the operations, to have a true secure distributed multitenant database. As no operation on the hosting side will require clear text decryption of the data and everything can be done securely on the client side. 
• Efficient Methods and Hardware for Deep Learning : Standford lecture where guest lecturer Song Han present algorithms and specialized hardware (FPGA, GPU, ASIC, etc..) that can be used to accelerate training and inference of deep learning workloads. [video]

[Links of the Day] 01/06/2017 : Istio microservice mesh , encrypted p2p network, formally proven system still vulnerable to bugs

• Istio : this is a fantastic project, it allow an efficient delivery of micro service infrastructure without tying the developer to a language specific framework. It relies on data plan using the Envoy proxy for managing and mediating all communication as well as a control plane for managing and enforcing proxy policies. 
• CJDNS : encrypted IPv6 network using public-key cryptography for address allocation and a distributed hash table for routing. This provides near-zero-configuration networking, and prevents many of the security and scalability issues that plague existing networks. [github]
• An Empirical Study on the Correctness of Formally Verified Distributed Systems : Spoiler alert, even formally verified project can fall prey to bugs. And it seems that these bugs can seriously affect real systems in the wild. Well looks like that human in the loop is the weakest link in the production of robust systems after all.

[Links of th Day] 16/11/2016 : Open Whisper, Security via BPF + XDP, Why cloud fails

• X3DH : stand for Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol. It allow asynchronous secure communication.
• Cilium : BPF start to emerge as the dominant tool for any network functionality out there. Google cilium which leverage BPF and XDP for enforcing dynamic security rules via eBPF. [github]
• Why Cloud Fails : Excellent review by Murat on the paper analyzing various cloud failures . Turn out that the vast majority are config related and upgrade related. Human failure only represent a very small portion of the overall numbers. [paper]

[Links of the day] 14/09/2016 : Ethic in AI , Survey of fully homomorphic encryption, RDMA over Ethernet at scale at Microsoft

• Ethical Preference-Based Decision SupportSystems : when AI and other autonomous agent start to be more ubiquitous in the human environment. As the decision of these systems will start to have a greater impact on our daily life, trust will need to be build and to achieve that these system will need that they are perceived to act in a moral and ethical way. 
• A brief survey of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, computing on encrypted data : fully homomorphic encryption allow you to manipulate encripted data without decrypting it. This is great for database and other systems as it allow service to modify and update information without the need to know its content. Effectively partitioning operation from knowledge. However this comes at a cost (but its going down). Might finally end up with the security pipe dream where the data is immediately encrypted and is only manipulated in this form until it is finally consumed.
• RDMA over Commodity Ethernet at Scale : It is interesting to see that RDMA start to slowly permeate hyper-scale data-center. However it is even more interesting to see that Microsoft decided to go for the RoCE version of it instead of infiniband. It make sens as there was a lot of investment in scaling the Ethernet for their cloud infrastructure and allow a lot of reuse and collocate normal and RDMA traffic on a single underlying fabric.

[Links of the day] 15/02/2016: Homomorphic cryptonet, Netflix OSS meetup S4E1, Jails & Zones

• Cryponet : really cool application of homomorphic encryption by microsoft enabling deep learning on encrypted data whi high accuracy. While I still think we are a still a couple of years away from everyday use of the tech due to performance limitation, this type of encryption is really going to up the game for security of public cloud data.
• Netflix Open Source Meetup Season 4 Episode 1 : netflix and OSS (co-)evolution and spinnaker [video]
• Jails and Zones : Papers We Love presentation by Bryan Cantrill on jails and zone in Solaris OS

Links of the day 10/12/2015: Networks, Crowds, and Markets book, end to end encrypted DB, low level Datacenter devops

• Networks, Crowds, and Markets : Books on the different scientific perspectives and approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
• ZeroDB : An end-to-end encrypted database protocol.
• Vapor : can't believe a company actually named themselves vapor .. anyway . While their hardware is semi interesting what really picked my interest is their Open Data Center Runtime Environment. It aims to offer capability to expose and manage low level DC capabilities such as Power and Temp. I am not sure if devops will really want to go that low but this might be a nice addition to orchestration framework for meta optimization.